


All Assorted Animorphs AUs

by SoloMoon



Category: Animorphs (TV), Animorphs - Katherine A. Applegate
Genre: AU, Canon-Typical Violence and Gore, more detailed warnings for each chapter, occasional character death, occasional unhappy endings
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-05-27
Updated: 2018-10-15
Packaged: 2018-11-05 13:18:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 22
Words: 64,547
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11014245
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SoloMoon/pseuds/SoloMoon
Summary: This is a series of short fics and/or story outlines exploring several different divergence points for Animorphs canon, both before and during the series, in order to look at how various changes would affect the characters and plot.  I initially created them at the request of tumblr followers, but I will be cross-posting all of them here.





	1. What if they were all adults?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [ Snaphound](http://snaphound.tumblr.com/) said: "i'm curious: do you think the animorphs could have won if they were adults? marco starts out as the only one with the maturity to understand death; it's sort of because the others don't have that understanding that they're so eager to fight. jake NEEDS to idealize past soldiers/leaders in order to keep himself, well, 'good', acting like he thinks they did, as much as he can. what do you think??"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Additional warnings this chapter for character death, mentions of genocide, and implied/referenced abortion.

Interesting premise. Let’s suppose the Animorphs are five adults—thirty-three, let’s say, instead of thirteen—who encounter Elfangor as they walk home from where they were getting a few drinks at the local bar after a high-school reunion. 

Suppose Marco is a smart-mouthed lawyer with more secrets and lies than genuine wins in his resume.  Suppose Rachel works as a graphic designer for a fashion magazine by day, but she lives for the nights when she goes surfing in the moonlight swells off the California coast or skiing at breakneck speeds in the Canada Rockies.  Suppose Tobias has been an adjunct professor at the local college for five years now and suspects he’s headed nowhere despite his Ph.D., whereas Jake is a high school dropout rocketing up through the ranks of his contracting firm thanks to his canny leadership skills.  Suppose Cassie’s in night school so that she can continue as a vet tech, always exhausted and always telling herself it’s all worth it.  Suppose they’re joined two weeks after the war begins by War-Prince Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill, who got his own self out from under the ocean without calling for help.   

  * The first thing the Animorphs do is fly north and tell the governor about the invasion.  She calls the National Guard, the president, and the United Nations.  Within a month, the yeerks have doubled their force on Earth and the two species are in open total war.
  * The U.N. appoints a military commander to oversee the Animorphs, a five-star general with thirty years of combat experience.  Jake and Ax both salute him and call him “sir,” but they’re the only ones. Cassie calls him by his first name when she asks about his family.  Rachel and Marco hold side conversations in whispered thought-speak throughout his briefings.  Tobias sits in the back of the room, either preening feathers or doodling on his intel packet depending on what form he’s in.  Every time he gives them an order they thank him, leave the room, and then look at Jake to find out whether or not they should obey it.  
  * The war wears on for months, then years, and the humans lose steadily. 
    * Here’s the thing that it takes the U.S. and the U.N. a dangerously long time to adapt to: every time they lose a soldier, they lose every single scrap of intelligence contained within that soldier’s brain.  Every single time they’re forced to leave a man behind, they lose every base that person has ever visited, every file that person has ever seen, every scrap of knowledge once kept secret in that brain.  The humans start equipping their soldiers with cyanide capsules; the yeerks start gagging hosts the instant they’re captured.  
    * Here’s the other thing they don’t figure out until it’s too late: even hardened soldiers balk at shooting their own friends and neighbors and siblings.  Even the ones with years of training will hesitate to shoot a child.  The yeerks know this, and they take advantage.
  * David is the son of the deputy director of the NSA, placed with the team in a blatant act of nepotism after he finds the morphing cube.  Rachel gets dishonorably discharged in the aftermath of the “accident” that causes his death.
  * Dissent starts to grow large within the ranks of the humans.  Several believe that the yeerks come in peace; several more believe that the humans should stop fighting and negotiate a truce.  There are still pockets of people who insist that there are no such thing as aliens, and the whole thing is made up to target certain types of people as “controllers.”  
  * The yeerks take the entire Eastern seaboard of the U.S. and Canada.  There are simply too many people, too densely packed; the human military cannot protect those areas.  The humans retreat to the Midwest and Mexico.  
  * Visser One gets put in charge of the invasion force, quietly moving Madra and Darwin offworld in the process.  Marco and Rachel, acting against orders, infiltrate her base and kill her and nearly sixty other high-ranking controllers before they are themselves gunned down.  The U.N. erects a statue in their honor, makes fifty other morph-capable soldiers to take their place, and keeps fighting.
  * Jake and Cassie marry.  She gets pregnant twice during the war, and knows that she can’t afford to keep either pregnancy. She never tells Jake about this.  Later, they will divorce in the last weeks of the war.
  * Visser Three once again takes over the invasion of Earth; he thrives at open war.  He bargains and threatens and calmly assures the human forces that they _will_ lose, and that there is only one way to avoid death.  All they have to do is walk to the nearest yeerk compound, surrender, and let one of his warriors take away all their worry and pain.  
  * The human race is dwindling.  There is no other way around it.  The yeerks kill humans because they already have more hosts than they need, and the humans kill humans every time they succeed in bombing a yeerk base or shooting a controller.  The species has already been decimated; everyone fears that within a decade it will be annihilated.  
    * The humans destroy a Blade ship.  Forty humans and eighteen hork-bajir die.  
    * Visser Three gets revenge by turning his dracon canon on China’s east coast.  Two hundred million humans die.  
    * The humans blow up a yeerk pool.  Two hundred thirty-eight humans die.
    * The yeerks blow up Rio de Janeiro.  Twelve million humans die.  
    * So it goes.
  * The human armies take refuge in Brazil and Argentina, in Tanzania and Angola and the DRC. The yeerks have control over the entire northern hemisphere.  Communications between the two continents are constantly intercepted.  Jake and Cassie and Ax go on mission after mission after mission, no one bothering to tell them what to do anymore.  Tobias comes sometimes; more and more since Rachel’s death he’s nowhere to be found.  
  * Food runs short. Electricity runs out.  In the heat of the summers and the cold of the winters, in the times when a few handfuls of dried sorghum are all that can go around, dozens of humans quietly slip away.  The controllers are well-fed, well-equipped, well taken care of.  All it takes to earn safety and comfort is to give up your soul.  
  * Three years pass this way, and the andalites finally arrive.  
    * They are merciful: they rescue the few hundred free humans who remain before they blow up the planet.  



**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The rebloggable post is [ here.](http://thejakeformerlyknownasprince.tumblr.com/post/156646879329/im-curious-do-you-think-the-animorphs-could-have)


	2. What if Tobias wasn't stuck in morph?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An anon asked: What if Tobias hadn't gotten stuck as a bird in the first book? Alternatively, what if one of the others had gotten stuck in morph?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Additional warnings in this chapter for bullying, implied child neglect, and some violence/gore.

  * Their first mission.  The Yeerk Pool.  Tobias is crouched in a hidden alcove above the hork-bajir cages, shaking from head to talons, longing for this nightmare to end.  Every molecule of color in the battle, every whisper of sound in between the screams, assails his enhanced senses with so much force that he thinks he’s going mad.  There’s no way out.  There’s nothing he can do.  He doesn’t know if any of the others are even still alive out there.  
    * And then a clawed hand touches his talon.  Tobias nearly startles into taking off, but stops himself when he realizes that one of the fierce-looking hork-bajir has reached up through the slats in the ceiling of the cage to get his attention.
    * “ _Hruthin_ ,” the hork-bajir says.  “You go.  We make yeerk look.”  He’s male, enormously strong, and his sire and dam called him Jara Hamee.  His bloodline is one which produces more seers than any other.  Tobias doesn’t know any of this.  All he knows is that he has gone from having no hope to having a tiny thread.
    * Tobias takes off, beating the air as hard as he can with wings made strong by terror.  The yeerks would spot him, but from behind him there is an enormous _CRASH_. Half a dozen hork-bajir have thrown themselves against the front of a cage all at once, tipping it clear over to smash on the ground.  All the controllers are running in that direction.
    * Tobias never finds out what happened to them.  Later, even after they free several hork-bajir, he’ll never see Jara Hamee again.
  * Afterward, he can’t stand the thought of going back to his uncle’s place, not when he doesn’t even know if the others are okay.  He walks for a long time, the streets silent and so very flat.  Eventually he finds himself outside Jake’s neighborhood.  He morphs again, flies up to tap at Jake’s window.  When Jake sits up, Tobias pretends not to see the tear tracks’ dried salt residue on his skin.  They talk for a long time, sitting side-by-side on the end of Jake’s bed, and then Tobias leaves.  
    * He goes back to wandering until the library opens at 7:00 the following morning.  The librarians are used to seeing him there for several hours a day; they don’t mind when he slumps on one of the reading room couches for a nap.  
    * Afterward, he checks out a battered copy of _The Witches_ for the fourth or fifth time and takes it to school with him, just to see whether it’s still scary after everything that’s happened.  
  * Rachel becomes the one to ask Tobias out, as they’re coming out of Algebra together one afternoon.  She’s normally so confident that it takes him a while to figure out that she’s just as nervous as he is.  They go out to a movie, get dinner afterwards, kiss twice on the long walk home.  When Tobias shyly asks her why she asked, she laughs.  “Because,” she says, “we could die at any moment.”
  * When Tobias starts having strange dreams, he takes forever to mention it to Jake, but when he does Jake admits that Cassie has been having the same dreams.  They all morph dolphins together and go to find Ax.
    * Inside the Dome ship, Tobias becomes the first one to greet the strange new andalite.  He follows Ax around for over three hours, pestering him with questions about everything from how andalites eat to what _that_ configuration of the pond and the tree is called.  Ax is cagey about the details of most of the technology, but far more willing to let Tobias poke at the strange plants and to translate the writing which covers the hatches and floor.  
    * Later, Ax takes DNA from all five of them.  His resultant morph is a little taller, a little rounder-faced, a little more floppy-haired.  It’s still beautiful enough to turn heads everywhere he goes.
  * Tobias and Rachel kiss before every battle, and they kiss after each time they demorph after having survived another fight.  Marco usually makes loud gagging noises while Jake and Cassie blush and avoid each other’s eyes. 
  * For three days, while the real version of Jake is tied up out in the woods starving out a yeerk, Tobias is the one who has a mom and a dad and a brother and a dog.  For three days, he learns what it’s like to have someone lean over and kiss him on the forehead before he goes to sleep.  For three days, he walks through the halls of his school without fear, and half the people in his grade wave or shout hello as he passes.  He eats three home-cooked dinners during which someone asks about his day and actually listens when he answers.  He wakes up on three different mornings to the scent of toasting bread and the soft sounds of Jake’s parents singing along to the radio in the kitchen.  
    * There are reminders, of course, that it’s all a lie.  Tom looks sharply at Tobias when Tobias gets up to duck into the bathroom to demorph for the third time in one afternoon, and Tobias feels the hairs on the back of his neck stand up.  Mr. Feyroyan stops talking in surprise when Tobias casually comes out with an answer to an Algebra problem that (he realizes too late) Jake probably wouldn’t have known.  Once Tobias gets caught out between classes an hour and fifty-seven minutes into his morph and no bathroom stalls free, and barely makes it in time.
    * The reminders aren’t enough to stop Tobias from wondering, just sometimes, what would happen if he left the morph in place just a little too long.  
  * The first time Rachel takes Tobias home to meet her mom and sisters, it doesn’t exactly go according to plan.  Naomi’s eyebrows raise when Tobias mentions the name of the street he lives on, and they draw together into a frown when he admits that he doesn’t so much have a curfew as he has a tendency to check in on his uncle every few days to make sure the old fart hasn’t yet drowned in his own vomit.  
    * Jordan, who is old enough to discern her mother’s barely-concealed snobbery but young enough to lack all tact, bluntly asks whether Tobias is from “the wrong side of the tracks,” because “Rachel’s not allowed to date guys from there.”  
    * The quality of the conversation doesn’t exactly improve from there on out, especially not after Rachel throws a blob of rice at Jordan and starts shouting at her mother.  
  * It’s an ordinary Tuesday when Tobias snaps.  For everyone else it is, anyway; for the Animorphs it’s the morning after a nasty, exhausting battle where they were an inch from dying eight times over while struggling to destroy the Anti-Morphing Ray.  Andy Valentino shoves Tobias up against a wall of lockers with all his strength—and Tobias shoves back.  
    * Tobias isn’t sure how it descends so fast from there, just that he is sick to _death_ of being pushed around and picked upon by everyone from cosmic powers to twerps like this.  Just that it feels so _good_ to cut loose, to take a hit and then hit back.  Andy’s got friends on the lacrosse team, though, and before Tobias knows it the fight has become three against one… And then Rachel flings herself on Tap-Tap from behind, and now it’s two against three. 
    * Half the school is watching them, or that’s what it feels like; they’re back-to-back, flinging wild punches at anything that gets too close, and there’s an entire circle of chanting losers surrounding them.  
    * Their fellow Animorphs are drawn by the noise, because of course.  Jake sends Cassie to find a teacher and Marco to make sure that Principal Greene beats Chapman to the scene.  He’s planning on staying put and trying to disperse the crowd himself—but then Evan Murphy gets both hands around Rachel’s throat and before Jake knows it he’s already waded in to fling him off. 
    * The three of them are fighting half the lacrosse team by now, and they’re just about holding their own.  They fight like wild things, like savage creatures, unafraid to dig teeth or nails into tender places, unafraid to fight dirty.  They have no technique, no training, but that doesn’t matter, because _they don’t go down_.  Most of the guys on the lacrosse team will back off if they're injured or even threatened enough.  The Animorphs know how to fight through severed limbs and bullet wounds and punctured arteries.  Compared to what they’re used to, a few cracked ribs or concussions are nothing at all.
    * John Spencer lands a punch that sends Tobias slamming back into the nearest locker so hard that he bounces off, ears ringing, jaw broken.  He spits shattered fragments of his own teeth at John in a spray of blood and flings himself forward again.  It feels all the while like he’s watching the battle from an enormous distance.
    * Andy throws himself onto Jake’s back and Jake rolls forward to fling him off with catlike grace.  Andy hits the ground with breath-stealing force and doesn’t get up.  Jake, half-blind with the blood running from his hairline, whips around to find his next opponent.
    * Rachel roars like an animal, paste-on nails snapping like claws as she jabs them into the soft meat of the lacrosse captain’s chin and stomach.  Tobias knows that she and Jake feel it too, the exhilaration of the blind bloodlust that has consumed them.
  * Mr. Tidwell isn’t the first teacher on the scene, but he—or maybe Illim—is the first one brave enough to wade in and drag Jake away from Sean Richardsen.  After that Ms. Paloma gets between Rachel and Evan, and Tobias has the good sense to back off before Chapman has to force the issue.  They all get dragged to the office—or the ones who aren’t due for a trip to the nurse’s or E.R. do—and interrogated for the next two hours.  The Animorphs don’t talk; the lacrosse team does.  Rachel and Jake each get a month’s suspension, whereas Tobias (who everyone knows doesn’t have irate parents who will come to his defense) gets ten weeks. 
    * Jake’s mom shouts, literally, until she loses her voice.  He listens, he nods, and he agrees with every word she says without irony or guile.  He knows how irresponsible it was to get involved. 
    * Rachel’s mom cries when she gets the call, which in its own way is even worse.  She asks Rachel if this is because of the divorce, voice so tired that Rachel falls over herself to come out with denials. 
    * “Ten weeks, huh?” Tobias’s uncle says.  “They better not expect me to feed you during ten weeks’ worth of no free lunches.”
  * Tobias lies to his uncle about it being in-school suspension, and spends most of the next two and a half months hanging out in Ax’s scoop during the day.  The other four come by as often as they can, bringing Pop-Tarts and class notes and homework and Lunchables and news.  Ax, who Tobias barely knows, takes Tobias flying more than once to try and map yeerk pool entrances.  
    * Marco handles the situation with his usual style: he makes jokes about it being a crime to keep nerd-boy from throwing off the grading curve for so many days on end while actual sympathy shows through in the frequency with which he visits with small gifts.  His class notes tend to be filled with rambling asides (his summary of the themes and motifs in _Great Expectations_ contains four pages’ worth of marginal notes on how Dickens is a bombastic moron who was clearly hoping no one would notice all those impossible coincidences in his stupid plot) but at least he takes notes which are more-or-less coherent.
    * Jake, on the other hand, has an approach to most classes which consists of zoning out for up to 20 minutes at a stretch before jerking back to reality long enough to scribble down a few key phrases that sound like they might be on the test later.  His summary of the themes in _Great Expectations_ is just “death, talking gravestone?, class struggle… prison ship = class… card names = class… word choice = class… Which class?  English class?… wittles = ??? (probably class)"
    * Tobias winces every time he sees Jake during that first week, because whereas Rachel can just tape her no-longer-broken fingers and redraw her bruises every morning with eyeshadow, Jake definitely can’t get away with making his broken nose or spectacular pair of shiners disappear without his dad especially asking too many questions.  Tobias himself stopped and fixed his concussion and fractured skull on the way home from school; he has no one in his life who will ask awkward questions.  
  * After that, they all fall into a pattern of doing each other’s homework to save time for missions.
    * Jake completes everyone’s take-home U.S. history quizzes, Cassie writes up several different versions of the same Biology experiment, and Rachel regularly performs a small miracle by writing five different essays that actually argue five different positions on whatever novel their English class has to read that month.  
    * Marco might grumble about filling out page after page of Algebra problems, but not only does he have a knack for math but he also has the easiest job, since he can find each answer once and then simply copy it four times. 
    * Ax’s primary contribution to the group effort consists of writing gushing reviews of the bad cooking projects Cassie and Tobias churn out for Home Ec. 
    * Tobias bats cleanup for the rest of the team, finishing Rachel’s and Cassie’s French assignments in between Jake’s Econ homework and Marco’s Art History projects.  If Marco is doing the least work (even when he occasionally fills in for Jake or Tobias on their Spanish work), then Tobias is doing by far the most.  He insists he doesn’t mind, and he really doesn’t; of all of them, he’s the only one still making an effort to learn things despite the war.  
  * Tobias coasts into his own neighborhood one afternoon with a whopping 90 seconds left before he’s trapped in morph.  He’s tested that boundary before, teased his finger close to the edge of that particular candle flame, but he’s not planning on going over today.  That’s why he lands behind the sparse cover of an empty dumpster and demorphs in the alley between houses.  The woman walking her dog catches him there.  
    * Tobias straightens up, fully human, heart pounding, wondering how on earth he’s going to talk his way out of this one.  The dog is whimpering in fear—or maybe in eagerness to eat the strange bird-human creature—and the woman says softly, “You all right there?”
    * Tobias is about to stammer out some kind of excuse when he registers, with a guilty rush of relief, that the woman’s not actually _looking_ at him as much as she’s tilting her head in his general direction.  That her dog is wearing a service vest.  That the handbag over her shoulder has a collapsible white cane sticking out of its pocket.  That she hasn’t taken off her sunglasses, even though they’re standing in a dark alleyway in late evening.
    * “I’m okay,” he says, stepping toward her.  In the glow of the streetlight he’s suddenly assailed with several other details: the round curve of her cheeks, the slope of her shoulders, the blond hair still thick between the scars.  The long nose he’s seen in the worn photograph next to his bed at home.  The pointed chin he sees in the mirror every morning.
    * He opens his mouth to ask if her name is Loren.  What comes out instead is “Mom?”



**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Original post [ here.](http://thejakeformerlyknownasprince.tumblr.com/post/160281850134/what-if-tobias-hadnt-gotten-stuck-as-a-bird-in)


	3. What if the Auximorphs joined the team right away?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [ Griffinguy24 ](https://griffinguy24.tumblr.com/)said: AU idea: what if the kids took the Escafil Device with them, noticed that disabled people were passed over by the Yeerks, and started recruiting the Auxiliaries right away?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Additional warnings this chapter for character death and ableism.

  * The Pediatric Long-Term Rehab Center of Children’s Hospital Los Angeles has a secret.  It’s an open secret, to be sure—any of the kids who aren’t directly involved nevertheless know something about something—but none of them have ever breathed a word to their parents or friends or caregivers about where James and his friends go when they sneak out every few nights.  Certainly no one has ever so much as hinted about the _way_ he and his friends leave, because who would believe them?  The nurses shut the window every time they come by; Faith or Pedro or one of the others left behind always opens it again.  
  * They’re divided into units: Craig’s team, Erica’s team, Jake’s team.  Jake and the five friends who fight directly under him all live across town, operating semi-independently, but they always find their ways to come by and check in with James.
    * Ax becomes a volunteer entertainer for the unit, swooping in every week to sing pop songs or play instruments for the children.  He’s delighted enough by mouth sounds that Collette and Liam actually start teaching him to sing for real after a while, so that he can perform Britney Spears and the Rolling Stones on command for the nurses.
    * Rachel brings home brochures for a gymnastics camp that meets twice a week after school every day, makes a big show of convincing both her own mom and Cassie’s parents to let them join, and then simply doesn’t bother signing either of them up for the camp in reality.  Every Monday and Thursday Naomi drops them off, clad in leotards and leggings, at the community center downtown.  Every Monday and Thursday, an osprey and a bald eagle can be seen soaring out the skylight and heading downtown.
    * Marco takes a bus to the hospital any time he feels like; Peter never notices his disappearances.  He’s a frequent enough visitor that the nurses know his face, but by then Marco is already dating Collette so that’s his excuse ready-made.
    * No one notices Tobias disappearing into thin air, and certainly no one notices the red-tailed hawk that can sometimes be seen circling the hospital’s rehab center.
    * Jake makes the daringest move of all when he simply joins The Sharing, which sends volunteers to the hospital every weekend to read to the patients.  He slouches around the edges of meetings making noise about how he’s only there for the free food and the college application boost, and eventually everyone concludes it’s not even worth the waste of time to ask him when he’s going to become a full member.
  * Jake might be their founder, but James is their commander.
    * “Doesn’t it bother you?” Jake asks one day.  “Ax calling you ‘prince’ all the time, I mean.  It would drive me nuts.”
    * “The last prince he had was his big brother,” James points out.  “He knows I could never fill those shoes, but I’m honored he’s asking me to try.”  
    * And Jake shuts up about the subject of titles.
  * The thing is, it’s a big group.  There are over 20 of them directly involved in the war, another 30-odd who know something about something.  The leak is inevitable.
    * The young man who walks into their rec room on an ordinary Tuesday bears a passing resemblance to Jake—same long nose, same dark eyes, same lanky build—but you could never mistake them, because the overt cruelty twisting those features is the kind of expression Jake would never wear.  “Which of you is James Connerton?” he asks.  James has him out cold on the floor before the yeerk has time for another word.
    * The next several minutes are a frantic hurricane of life-or-death decisions made too quickly with not enough information.  James gathers everyone who can morph, everyone who can fly and fight, and he’s sending them out the window as droves of pigeons before they can do more than ask what’s going on.  In the chaos, there is no time to grab anything, no time to leave messages for family or friends.
    * Liam says “I’m not going with you,” and in the long silence that follows everyone figures out what he means.  
    * “You _traitor_ ,” Tricia spits.  James holds up a hand to stop her.  It takes maybe the greatest effort of willpower he’s ever exerted, but he watches with dry eyes and clenched jaw as Kelly morphs and kills Liam on the spot.  
    * The brutal thing is, Liam’s not the only one who can’t come with them.  There are several others who cannot survive on the run, away from respirators and morphine and palliative care.  “Do as they tell you,” James tells the ones he leaves behind.  “Give them everything they for ask about us, cooperate with everything they ask for, and try not to get yourselves killed.  That means…”  And now the tears threaten harder, but again he forces them back.  “If they ask you to become controllers, you do it.  We will end this war, and we will be back for you.  Until then… _Survive_.”
    * As the others either brace themselves or flee, James walks back into his room.  He kisses Pedro on the forehead, whispers “Take care of them.”  And then he morphs falcon, leading his reduced flock away from the building as the black limousine pulls up outside.
  * When they land in the woods, they take nearly an hour to let it sink in: they were twenty-six this morning, and right now they are fifteen.
    * Julio screams at the sky.  Craig calls Liam names that most fourteen-year-olds wouldn’t even know.  Erica doesn’t morph, but her howl of rage and pain does credit to her wolf shape.  Pedro was the little brother James never had; Ray was Erica’s first love.  
    * And then they pick themselves up, take inventory, and start planning where to go from here.  These children’s lives have all touched loss, from the accident that took James’s father and his legs, to the three roommates Jessie has seen die throughout a lifetime spent in hospitals, to the twenty-year limit doctors have put on Collette’s lifespan.  They know how to categorize, how to cope, how to adapt around scar tissue and amputation.  They adjust, and then they go back to work.
  * Jake’s team appears to be secure—for now.  James and the others make it to the hork-bajir valley with their help, and with Toby’s help they start planning their next attack.
  * It’s a routine reconnaissance mission on the outskirts of a Sharing meeting, one that’s not meant to turn into a full-blown attack until suddenly it does.  They are an army, the twenty-one of them who remain, and there are so many frantic messages shouted back and forth in thought-speak that when Jake gives the order to retreat, Cassie doesn’t hear until it’s too late.  They are an army, and so it’s not until they do a headcount mid-retreat that they realize they left one behind.
    * The yeerks never took her.  It’s a small reassurance, but it’s the only one the Animorphs have.  
    * Forty-eight hours later, Cassie’s parents paper the town with missing posters.  Her image makes it to the local news, next to a segment of Michelle tearfully begging for any word at all about her daughter.  The adults’ search goes on for over three months, hope waning steadily.
    * Jake spends most of that time sitting in his room staring at the wall.  Jean tells him that if he wants to talk she’s here.  Steve reassures him more than once that they’ll find Cassie soon.  Tom—or the appearance of Tom—mutters about how Jake didn’t even know her that well so he should probably get over it.  Homer, who doesn’t know much but still understands human emotion better than Temrash 114 ever will, curls up at Jake’s side and growls at anyone who gets too close.  
    * Jake thinks of pieces of a wolf’s body, cut clean down the middle by a dracon beam.  They are buried at the edge of the farmland Cassie’s family has owned for over a century, marked only by a boulder Marco’s gorilla hands rolled over the fresh earth.  Jake tells James, “I’m out,” and James doesn’t argue.
    * Rachel, however…  Rachel shows up in Jake’s doorway after his fourth missed meeting, her perfect makeup almost enough to hide her red-rimmed eyes.  She sits on the end of Jake’s bed (growling right back at Homer when he objects) and says, “You know what I’ve been asking myself more and more since the war started?  ‘What would Cassie do?’  Because she was the best of us at keeping true to herself despite the war.  And if I can figure out what she _would_ do, then most of the time I can figure out what I _should_ do.”  She leans close, not letting Jake look away.  “We have got to keep her around, or I don’t even want to know what’s going to happen to the rest of us.  We’ve gotta keep figuring out what she would do, and we’ve gotta keep doing it, or by the end of the war we’ll all be more like me than like her.”  She sticks out her hand, palm up in offering.  “So come on.  The yeerks are shipping portable kandrona generators through the garment factory downtown, and according to Marco I’m in charge of this little team for now.  So we’re gonna do this raid, and we’re gonna do it right.  Like Cassie would insist that we did.”
    * Jake takes her hand.  The raid goes according to plan, as much as these things ever do.  Afterward, he leaves a pebble on top of that unmarked stone.  
  * While all of this is going down, Kelly stops breathing in her sleep.  Timmy wakes up in time to resuscitate her, and she morphs, but two days later it happens again.  The thing is, cystic fibrosis is progressive, and it’s not fixed by morphing.
    * Kelly and James have a long conversation.  She says a lot of things she doesn’t mean, he says a lot of things he does, and at the end of it she acquires DNA from him.  From Collette.  From Elena.  From every single one of her fellow Animorphs.  Ax talks her through the process, and then she morphs for the very last time.  
    * A teen runaway shows up at a shelter downtown, claiming her name is Kelsey James.  Within two weeks she’s in foster care.  Her fight is done.  
    * Timmy doesn’t wake up when Julio starts struggling a month later, and the following morning Julio doesn’t wake up at all.
    * James calls a meeting of the entire team, because they can’t keep going like this, with no equipment or support or doctors’ assistance.  Jake hesitates for a long time, but at last he says it: “My dad’s a pediatrician.”
  * It was always only a matter of time before the yeerks’ investigations into James’s known associates turned up a connection to Marco or Ax; the time has come to evacuate the four families that remain ignorant.  
    * Ax and Rachel convince her mom to take her sisters and follow them to safety.  Marco takes Collette with him, and together they decide what to tell his dad.  Tobias uses his own and Timmy’s gentler touch to approach Cassie’s parents with the news that they can’t bring their daughter back, but they can offer closure.  
    * Jake, James, and half a dozen other Animorphs do with a sledgehammer what the others are accomplishing with a scalpel.  Tom gets unceremoniously tossed in the trunk of the car, tied up with almost a hundred yards’ worth of duct tape.  Jake holds his own mother at gunpoint as she drives with shaking hands where he directs her, glancing occasionally in the mirror at her white-faced husband and the full-grown lion draped across their back seat.  Nothing any of them say will convince Jean and Steve that their son has been replaced by an alien, so they don’t even bother.  Explanations will have to be sorted out at a later time.
    * Everyone arrives in one piece, more or less.  James, who has a knack for this kind of thing, sits Jake’s parents down to explain.  Jake leaves him to it, more concerned with negotiating for his brother’s life.  He offers the yeerk a fast death, and makes it very clear that the only alternative is a slow one.  
    * The yeerk chooses the easier option.  Jake grants it.  And then Tom pulls him into the longest hug Jake’s had in his life, clinging for over ten minutes as if Jake is the only raft in a storm.
  * Steve writes the most extensive shopping list Jake has ever seen in his life, and the Animorphs use it to rob a hospital for everything Erica and the others will need.  James takes the morphing cube, goes to the nearest school for the blind, and comes back with over a dozen new Animorphs.  Tobias disappears for almost a week, but when he comes back Loren is with him.  Rachel leads her team of five on mission after mission, and at the end of each one the stack of pebbles on Cassie’s grave grows by one.  Naomi writes the hork-bajir their own constitution.  Loren starts an interspecies baseball league.  Toby starts freeing human-controllers along with her hork-bajir, and the population of their valley swells to almost 500 people.  
  * There are about a dozen of them sitting around a fire, debating next moves, when Tom says, “I could steal you a Blade ship.  But I’d need a hell of a diversion.”
    * Jake and Rachel smile at each other, nearly identical grins.  And then they become the first two to volunteer for the suicide run.
    * The ensuing fight is bloody, and awful, because that’s the way that war works.  Somewhere in the middle of it, Ax points out that the yeerk pool can be drained for cleaning.  It’s Marco who says, “C’mon, man, what would Cassie do?” and stays his hand.  Instead they fake an alarm indicating a hull breach in the Pool ship; in the end, it works just as well.  
  * They win, kind of.
    * <Who exactly are you?> the andalite prince asks.  
    * Marco cocks a thumb.  “This is James.  James Connerton.  President of Earth.”
  * James retires, more or less, retreating to work quietly as a volunteer in youth outreach in downtown Los Angeles.  He leaves the limelight to Marco and Collette, the political wrangling to Timmy and Elena.  There are just five Animorphs left, where once there were dozens, but James sees to it that the others are not forgotten.  He pays for the monument erected on top of Cassie’s grave, the sports scholarship earmarked for teenage girls in Rachel’s memory.  Tobias gets a national forest purchased in his name; Ax gets a $500,000 anonymous donation to CinnaBon’s R&D department.  To honor Jake, James writes a memoir, preserving all their stories exactly as they happened before history has the chance either to glorify them or to gloss them over.  



**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Original post [ here](http://thejakeformerlyknownasprince.tumblr.com/post/158871447714/au-idea-what-if-the-kids-took-the-escafil-device).


	4. What if they all went to Hogwarts?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [ Catpella ](http://catpella.tumblr.com/)said: What is your Sorting for the Animorphs?

**Tobias** gets transferred into Hogwarts during his third year after Ilvermorny discovers that not only is his aunt months behind on tuition, she is also not doing much of anything to take care of him.  Three days after showing up at the house of some distant British uncle, he boards a train in London with dozens of other teenagers and gets shipped off to a castle up north somewhere.  Once he gets there, Professor Robbinette gives him a private sorting ceremony in a back room.  The Sorting Hat spends quite a while telling Tobias that he has a lot of the qualities of a good Ravenclaw before admitting that he would probably fit best in Hufflepuff, and Tobias thinks _whatever you want_.  In response to that answer, the Hat, of course, puts him in Hufflepuff. **  
**

**Cassie** is already on the fast track to becoming a prefect for Hufflepuff, so she’s the one that Professor Chapman sends to show the transfer student around.  She chats with Tobias about how her favorite subject is Care of Magical Creatures and his is Astronomy, and assures him that there are more students here at Hogwarts like the two of them—raised as muggles—than there are purebloods like Rachel and Jake.  After leaving his things on a bed off the Hufflepuff common room and stopping in the kitchens to introduce him to the house-elves, she brings him upstairs to introduce him to her friends.  And to Jake, who might just think of her as more than a friend, if Rachel is to be believed.  

**Jake** is distracted while meeting the new student, less concerned with some American transfer than he is with the fact that he didn’t make Gryffindor’s Quidditch team.  It’s not just that he got cut.  It’s that when he admitted to Tom that he didn’t make the team, Tom just shrugged and said there were more important things than Quidditch, which was why he’d quit being captain himself.  Tom has been acting strangely for weeks now, ever since he made Head Boy, and it’s just bizarre that he would quit the team when their entire family lives for Quidditch.  Still, Jake makes an effort to be nice to Tobias, even if he doesn’t know _what_ to make of the way that Rachel is looking at the new kid.  

**Rachel** spends the first five minutes with Tobias coaxing one of those shy, dreamy smiles out of him, and grins so broadly in return she thinks she startles him.  It’s a shame that Tobias is not in Gryffindor, she thinks, because not only did a certain cousin of hers—she glares at Tom down the table and debates the merits of hexing him—decide to quit the team, but Tobias also shyly admits when asked that he’s pretty good at flying himself.  Proud Gryffindor or no, Rachel is also not about to try out for the team herself.  She barely has enough balance to stay on a broom, much less fly around swatting at bludgers the way Tom does.  The team is going to get slaughtered this year without him, though, so she gets as far as pulling out her wand before Jake grabs her arm and whispers “If you get detention for jinxing the Head Boy two days before a full moon…” and she reluctantly sits back down.  When she glances over at Tobias, he’s watching them both with clear curiosity.

**Marco** is, as always, reluctant to be seen hanging around with the Berensons since they’re the most Gryffindor family in the history of Hogwarts and his own position in Slytherin tends to be precarious at best.  Sure, Marco knows how to make the whole common room laugh, and he can talk circles around most of their professors enough to impress the younger students, but everyone knows about his family history.  His mother might have been a pureblood witch famous for her beauty as well as her skill with potions, but she married a muggle man who stumbled upon magic accidentally by way of science and then she died ten years later.  Marco’s dad has been Obliviated so many times that nowadays he barely functions, and some of the more meatheaded older students in Slytherin think that that makes Marco no better than a muggle-born.  Jake doesn’t really get it—not only is he as pureblooded as they come, but he also got sorted into Gryffindor in ten seconds flat with no questions asked—but he’s also been there for Marco since before they even started at Hogwarts, so Marco lets himself get dragged over to meet the new Hufflepuff since he’s such a good friend and all.  

**Ax** floats across the Great Hall from the Ravenclaw table, oblivious to all the heads he turns with his casual beauty, to ask Cassie if she’s finished with the bouillabaisse.  He introduces himself to Tobias and explains he’s a transfer student as well, “From the Ivory Coast” [Cassie coughs loudly] “…of Canada.”  Tobias frowns at this explanation like maybe Ax said something wrong, but then Marco distracts them all by teasing Ax for having ridiculous taste in obscure French foods while the rest of them are happy with meat and potatoes.  Ax cringes in remembered sympathy when Professor Chapman (who as the Deputy Headmaster gets stuck with these responsibilities a lot) stands Tobias up in front of the whole school to introduce him, before going into the usual announcements about how students are not allowed to enter the Forbidden Forest even though the rumors of werewolves and strangely intelligent animals hiding in its depths are unfounded gossip.  (Rachel and Marco grin knowingly at each other at this last one, and Jake shoots Ax a sympathetic look as the first years all start whispering fearfully about werewolves.)  

Jake and Rachel are having a whispered argument in their usual spot above the Owlery where Cassie’s dad works—Rachel thinks they should tell Tobias everything and make him an Animagus, whereas Jake is firmly against it out of fear of repeating the David Incident—when Marco comes stalking in, so quickly that Ax looks up from his spell practice and Cassie sets aside the owl treat she’s holding.  Marco slams an enormous book on Imperius Curses down on the table between them, and says, “Loop him in, I say, because it looks like we have one hell of a problem on our hands.”  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Rebloggable post [ here](http://thejakeformerlyknownasprince.tumblr.com/post/153822532594/what-is-your-sorting-for-the-animorphs).
> 
> *pulls out [ mug](https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0690/5113/products/12680_587ff63242fe84.78443370_donttreadonme.mug_1024x1024.jpg?v=1494965853)*  
> *puts on kettle*  
> *sips tea and waits for inevitable disagreement*


	5. What if David never betrayed them?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Anonymous asked: How would the series have played out if David hadn't betrayed the group?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Additional warnings this chapter for character death, sexual harassment, and bullying.

  * For a long minute, Jake and David stare each other down in the middle of the hotel room, the breeze from the broken window making the only movement as it rustles their hair.  “Fine,” Jake says at last. “Spend the night.  But we’re going to talk about this in the morning, and this is _not_ happening again.”
    * “Yes, _sir_.” David smiles mockingly.
    * When he rejoins Tobias and Ax outside, Jake can feel the questions in their stares.
    * <I’m not going to push this one,> he says grudgingly.  <He just lost his family, his home, everything he knew…>
    * <Poor poopsie,> Tobias snaps.
    * Jake stops talking.  He’s addressing a kid who constantly survives being trapped in a whole other body and one who lost most of his family the day he crash-landed on this foreign planet.  Tobias is right: if they could both adjust, then David should be able to as well.
    * Sometimes he hates being in charge. <Look,> he says, <I don’t love this either, but he’s one of us now and we’re going to have to learn to work with him.  We wouldn’t have gotten this far if you and Marco hadn’t learned to get along.  We never would've gotten _anywhere_ if Rachel and I still got in fistfights every time we disagreed the way we did in elementary school.  I’m sure we’ll figure out a way to get along with David, okay? >


  * <One of you is the human child named David—>
    * Tobias cuts Visser Three off mid-sentence.  <Don’t be ridiculous.  We would never resort to using a human child to do our dirty work.  Who do you take us for?>
    * Undeterred, Visser Three tries again.  <Then you should tell David that I have his parents, that—>
    * This time, he’s cut off when David sinks four-inch fangs into his back leg and starts chewing.  Visser Three morphs, they fight, they escape—barely—before the human authorities get there.  
    * David gloats the whole way home, until Marco says <Don’t get cocky, kid,> in a voice that’s not quite gentle but not quite harsh either.  It seems to do the trick, because David shuts up for the time being.
  * David moves in with Erek’s family.  It’s not a perfect solution, definitely not a long-term one, but it’s what they can manage for the moment.  It ensures that at the very least David can sleep in a bed and get three meals a day, that (although Jake would never admit to this motivation) he has someone to keep an eye on him any time he’s not with the main group. 
    * Marco conveniently forgets to mention, as he’s moving David in, that the nearly-omnipotent androids can’t actually defend themselves or even harm anyone at all.  David will no doubt figure it out sooner rather than later, but in the meantime having Erek casually demonstrate his ability to lift an entire refrigerator one-handed during David’s first hour at the Kings’ doesn’t hurt anything. 
  * After that, they get into the habit of meeting less often, or in smaller groups.  Rachel or Marco will often go out into the woods to meet Ax and Tobias there, or Jake will stop by Cassie’s or Marco’s place on his own.  They don’t admit to themselves that they’re avoiding whole-group meetings because there’s no way to meet like that without inviting David along… Nevertheless, that’s what’s happening.  
  * “So then he’s like, ‘Marco hits on you all the time, and you never get all PMS on him.’”  Rachel paces up and down, gesticulating wildly, while Jake watches from his seat on the bottommost bleacher of the school gym as if this is a one-woman sporting event.  “Which, _no kidding_ , because let’s start with the fact that _Marco_ doesn’t use terms like ‘all PMS’ when I tell him to take a hike.  And don’t get me started on the way that little twerp _looks_ at me.  It’s—”
    * “Yeah,” Jake says very quietly.  “I’ve seen.”
    * Rachel growls, throwing her hands up.  She pivots on the far end of her cycle, hair flying around her, face red.  “He’s such a perverted, disgusting, small-brained cromagnon bastard.  And hellooooo, I _have_ a boyfriend already, which even if I didn’t, still wouldn’t be grounds for comments like…”  She drops her voice, jutting out her jaw in an exaggerated parody.  “‘Do you always have that leotard under your clothes, Rachel?  Do you even wear underwear at all?’”
    * Jake flinches.  “Jesus, he said that?”
    * Rachel crosses her arms.  “No, I just made that up because I love talking about my fucking _underwear_ with my fucking _cousin_.”
    * Jake holds up both hands defensively.  “I didn’t mean to question you.  I just…”  He props his elbows on his knees, burying his face in his hands.  “I’ll talk to him,” he mumbles into his fingers.  “Again.”
    * “You’ve tried talking.”  Rachel sounds less angry now.  She knows Jake's just a lost kid like her, that he doesn’t have a magical solution.  “We both have.  We’ve talked to him, like, a dozen times now.  It doesn’t stick.”
    * Jake rubs at his forehead with enough force it’s as if he’s trying to press his brains into a new shape with his fingertips.  “What should we do, then?”
    * They stare at each other in silence for a long time.  They’ve both had the talks, of course they have; they know why it’s important to tell an adult if anyone says something to make either of them uncomfortable.  And that’s the crux of it: they want to tell an adult.  They both want to give this one to a grown-up to handle, because it’s too grown-up for them to know what to do.  
    * “I’ll talk to him again,” Jake says at last.  
    * Rachel sighs.  “I’ll do my best to ignore it.”
    * It’s not a solution, not remotely.  It’s also all they have.
  * They start going on missions as two semi-separate smaller units.  Jake gets very good at the strange algebra of what their team dynamic has become.  He will usually pair himself and Cassie—sometimes Ax as well—with David.  He’ll send Rachel, Marco, and Tobias out as their own unit.  Sometimes he takes a break from David’s constant cycle of complaining, taunting, and gloating, and will guiltily give himself a mission with Rachel’s team instead.  More often he’ll let Cassie or Ax, or even both, join the other team while he takes point on handling David.  Tobias and David can work together, if the mission absolutely requires it.  Marco and David cannot, no matter how dire the situation is.  Rachel and David are out of the question. 
    * One consequence of this strange arrangement is that they all regularly take breaks from the missions at times.  They get out of the habit of being a team, a family; instead, they are a ragged collection of whichever three or four or five people can be spared to attack tonight’s Kandrona shipment or next week’s Sharing recruitment event.  
    * It’s not a solution.  It’s also the best thing Jake’s got.
  * Jake is halfway to his room when his mom calls out.  “Honey?  Your friend stopped by.”
    * He freezes, turns, and finds David sitting in his living room.  David is talking in a low voice to Tom, whose yeerk is feigning interest only half-heartedly.  Jake charges through the door so quickly that both of them look at him in surprise, drawing him up short halfway across the room.
    * “You’ve got a great family, you know that?”  David puts a little too much emphasis on each word.  “You’re really lucky.  You know that, _right_?”
    * Jake shepherds him upstairs as quickly as he can.  “What are you doing here?” he demands, once they’re alone.
    * David’s eyes immediately fill with crocodile tears.  He spins the lie that Jake was expecting, even if he didn’t know to expect it from this direction: he misses having a family, he just wanted a normal evening, he doesn’t have the chance to eat a home-cooked meal every night the way Jake does, is it so wrong…
    * Jake watches him talk, nodding as if he believes this.  Jake knows by now that this is just how David is: he’s the kind of kid who loves nothing better than to pour a puddle of gasoline on the floor and then inch matches ever closer to its edge, for no other reason than to watch other people’s anger and fear.  
    * David could ensure that Jake, too, ends up living at the mercy of the hork-bajir or chee as his entire family are enslaved, if he even survived that long.  All it would take are three words whispered in Tom’s ear.  David’s proving to Jake, and to himself as well, that he has that power, and he’s willing to use it.  
    * “Stay for dinner,” Jake says at last.  “But if you ever show up at my house again, don’t expect my parents to let you in.  I’m having a conversation with them both after you leave.”
    * It's not a solution, but it's all he knows how to do.
  * “I’m sorry,” David says for the fortieth or fiftieth time as they trudge away from their very next mission.  “I really am.  Okay?  It was an accident.  You know that, right?  It was an accident.  I’m sorry.”
    * “We know you didn’t mean it.”  Cassie’s tone of voice is kind on the surface, but its undercurrent suggests that she’s just as tired of listening to his whining as everyone else.  
    * They had been cornered back there, outnumbered and outfought by a dozen hork-bajir.  If all seven of them had been present, they might have had a chance.  As it was, they were all seconds away from dying even before, somewhere in the heat of battle, David’s slashing claws had opened Jake’s left flank to the bone.  Jake had collapsed on the floor, bleeding to death from severed arteries.  David had suddenly snapped into hero-mode and fought off the three hork-bajir that menaced them before dragging Jake to safety.  The fact that Cassie had walked around the corner at that exact second was probably a coincidence.  Probably.
    * “Jake hates me, doesn’t he?” David whines.  “It was an accident.  Anyway, he’s fine now, and I said I was sorry.  It was just an acc—”
    * <Yes,> Ax snaps suddenly.  <It was an accident.  A very foolish, sloppy accident.  Warriors who cannot tell friend from foe in the heat of battle are more dangerous to their own allies than to their enemies.  Any _aristh_ who is so careless with his tail blade so as to injure his own prince does not deserve to have a tail anymore. >
    * “Ax…”  Jake takes a deep breath, trying to massage the headache out of his temples without much luck.  “He knows he screwed up, okay?  It’s not going to happen again.”
  * The algebra changes again, after that incident.  Ax is so disgusted with David’s very existence he can barely stand the sight of him, and doesn’t exactly keep this a secret.  Jake starts taking Tobias with him and Cassie as backup on David-wrangling duty.  It’s not fair to Tobias, not remotely—David bullies him worse than anyone but Rachel.  But Tobias has an utterly horrifying amount of experience in grinning and bearing it, and so he does.
    * Jake isn’t sure how long it’ll be before it’s just him and Cassie and David.  Or just him and David.  He apologizes before each mission and after each nasty comment to Tobias and Cassie, even though they know perfectly well it’s not his fault.  
    * While all Jake’s energy is taken up elsewhere, Rachel leads a raid on a television studio that gets a random bystander killed.  She and Marco fight about it afterward; their shouting match seems mild by comparison to some of the rows David has started, since no blood gets drawn.  
  * Jake dreams every night, and it’s always the same dream.  He slinks through the forest on cat feet, ethereal as fog, following a distant flash of yellow fur.  When he catches his prey he digs teeth and claws into all the soft places that that mane cannot protect, until there is nothing but meat on the ground.  He sits looking over the shattered corpse on silent haunches, and then moves on.  
    * He feels guilty every time it happens, but not that guilty.  They’re the only good dreams he has left.
  * They’re all there, when it happens.  The basement garage has flooded with dozens of controllers from four or five different species, and the seven of them are not enough.  They’ve given up on trying to get to the computer files they came for; now they’re just battling with everything they’ve got to get to the exit.
    * Rachel is a monster of unstoppable rage, slashing blindly at everything that comes within range of her claws.  When she goes down, Marco rushes to help even as Jake and Ax make a hole in the surrounding troops with desperate brutality.  When David goes down across the room, Tobias tries to help.  Really, he does.  
    * Jake gets the industrial garage door open long enough that first Cassie and Ax, then himself and Tobias, can race through.  It’s Marco who makes the call, shouting for Jake to shut the door before any hork-bajir can get through and leave the others to fend for themselves.  
    * Cassie and Tobias are both shouting at Jake to go back for Rachel and Marco.  Somewhere inside, David is screaming for help even as Rachel continues raging at the controllers.  But Jake knows that Marco made the right call, and so he reverses the course of the door.  
    * It slams shut.  Jake watches it, and he doesn’t let Cassie past him to reopen their teammates’ only exit.  Inside, some of the screams are audible not just to their ears, but inside of their minds.  
    * Five minutes pass, as they wait outside, still able to hear the animal and alien screams inside.  Hours pass, in the span of those five minutes.
    * Later, Jake won’t ask Rachel or Marco what happened during those five minutes.  No one will.
    * When the door starts to slide up once more, they all tense—until the enormous black-furred hand catches the underside and swings it upward.  Marco is half-dragging Rachel, who has even more blood around her claws and mouth than before but is also oddly subdued.  
  * <David?> Tobias asks.
    * <Dead.>  Marco doesn’t sugar-coat it.
  * Jake drags them all away from the scene of the battle, because no one else has the presence of mind to do anything but stand there and shiver in shock.  Cassie nearly gets run over when she stops in the middle of the street to puke her guts out on the asphalt.  Rachel’s face is so pale in the streetlights she looks faintly green.  Silent tears streak Marco’s face, and he makes no effort to wipe them away.  It’s a warm California night, but they are all, to a one, very cold.
    * Funny, how quickly they fall back into their old constellation of all working together to hold each other upright.  Jake can’t form sentences; it’s Ax who morphs him and fakes a call to his parents with some excuse to spend the night at Marco’s.  Cassie pulls herself together enough to call Rachel’s mom and explain the sleepover they are going to have tonight as if she’s an adult talking to a child and not the other way around.  Tobias disappears over the rooftops; Ax morphs at top speed and follows.
  * That evening, Cassie will smother Rachel in every blanket she owns and give her hot chocolate besides.  Ax will coax Tobias into morphing andalite once again, and together they will perform the ritual of death.  Marco will shepherd Jake home and make bright excuses to Peter, never showing the slightest sign of concern even when Jake doesn’t say a single word all evening long.  
    * That night, Jake’s dream is like nothing he’s ever experienced before.  He’s not a tiger, or even a kid; he’s a grown man living in yeerk-owned New York City.  After he makes a choice, he asks the presence which has sent him the dream: _Why_?
    * BECAUSE, the power answers. YOU JUST MADE THE CHOICE WHICH WILL SAVE THE WORLD.



**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The rebloggable post is [ here](http://thejakeformerlyknownasprince.tumblr.com/post/159842218564/how-would-the-series-have-played-out-if-david).


	6. What about a songfic of Wicked?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [ Miraculoussparrow ](https://miraculoussparrow.tumblr.com/)requested more information about an Animorphs/Wicked crossover I mentioned a while back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You do not have to be familiar with Wicked to follow this one, I promise; it's more about the relationship between Cassie and Rachel.

**No One Mourns the Wicked**  
Some small part of Cassie is perversely grateful when she steps up to the podium at Rachel’s funeral and never gets the chance to utter a single word.  She’s already choking on fear, desperate to get this right and devastated by the knowledge she won’t be able to—and then she’s drowned out by the sudden and devastating _poppoppoppopBANG_ of fireworks that rattles the graveyard with a horror of sound.  

Someone, somewhere across town is having a parade.  Because of course.  Because the war’s over, and this is a happy occasion.  She can hear them singing, in the silence left between explosions.  The graveyard itself is silent, the mourners shellshocked into stillness.  

Later she’ll stumble away into the city, tear-blind, inadequate eulogy a crumpled wad of paper in her pocket, and a total stranger will pull her into a hug so suddenly she starts morphing in surprise.  After she registers what the woman is saying—it’s a babbled string of gratitude and joy, nearly incoherent—she pulls away more gently.  Later that night someone will thrust a bottle of wine into her hands; someone else will gently place a _pileus_ on her head.  Five more total strangers will shake her hand; sixteen will recognize her long enough to shout thanks or praise.  It’s the single largest celebration their small city has ever seen.  

Surrounded on all sides by singing and clapping, wearing a crown of yellow flowers she doesn’t remember receiving, Cassie thinks back to the last sight she saw before leaving the graveyard.  Jake was silhouetted against the last light of dusk, shoulders hunched and shaking as he stood over the far headstone two rows down from Rachel’s, one that was smaller and unadorned but part of the Berenson family plot all the same.  They both deserve better than this gaudy horrorshow.  All of them do.  

**One Short Day**  
The first time Cassie suspected that girl Rachel she knew from camp was going to be her best friend, they were on the playground in third grade.  Rachel had marched over to where a fifth-grade boy was making fun of Cassie’s shoes to shove her face up against the older boy’s.  “Yeah, Cassie’s got old sneakers,” she said brazenly. “ _So what_?”  

Amazing the power of those words, _so what_ , to shut down anyone who criticized their clothes or their voices or anything about them.  Cassie never learned to say them with the confidence that Rachel used, but she learned to hold her head up high all the same.  

Rachel was the one who taught Cassie about the sheer power that came with not caring—or at least appearing not to care—what other people thought.  They were both weird, both not quite perfectly aligned with what the other girls in their class thought they should be.  Rachel kicked all the boys’ butts at soccer in gym class and shouted out correct answers without bothering to raise her hand, even though girls were supposed to scorn sports and wait their turn before speaking.  Cassie wore jeans with bird poop and cared more about equestrian health standards than My Little Pony dolls, even though she was supposed to wear pink dresses and fantasize about horses without actually _owning_ any.  The thing was, Rachel could get away with being the wrong kind of girl, because she was joyous and unapologetic in her rebellion, able to laugh in the face of anyone who had a problem with the way she acted.  Cassie could get away with it too, because when you were friends with Rachel there was pride rather than shame in standing out from the crowd.

**What is This Feeling?**  
_Dearest Daddy and Mom,_ Rachel wrote in her best penmanship.  (Given that she was seven years old, the best that can be said is that it was legible.)   _Sleepaway camp has a lot of fun things.  Today I made a friendship bracelet and learned how to tie a knot.  The only thing is my bunkmate._  Here, Rachel chewed on her pen in thought, trying to come up with a way to describe the weird girl with the overalls and the boyishly short hair without being mean.  It wasn’t like there was anything wrong with Cassie, after all.  She just didn’t know anything about Limited Too or Boys 2 Men or Nintendo.  And she had the weirdest stories.   _She’s weird, and her clothes are awful, but she’s the best in camp at woodcrafts which is dumb,_ Rachel wrote at last.   _I miss you guys.  Please write back._

_Hi Dad,_ Cassie scribbled on camp stationary. _I hope you and Cinnamon and Misty and Star and Blaze and all the other horses and the sick crow and the baby foxes and also Mom are all good.  I am not good.  Camp is stupid.  Our cabin leader is super old, like 15 or 16, but she STILL doesn’t know the difference between ash leaves and elm leaves.  My bunkmate is the stupidest part.  She thinks ponies are a type of horse and paints her nails before we go pick up bugs in the woods and wears dresses on the jungle gym.  She brought 5 pairs of sandals to camp and wears more hair clips than anyone I ever saw.  Just because she’s the best in camp at gymnastics doesn’t mean I like her.  Please please please please please please please come pick me up._

Walter didn’t come to pick Cassie up, and good thing too: later that week she and Rachel beat every single other pair of bunkmates at the Nature Fun Time Obstacle Course, working together to rush through the activities (and across the rope bridge, and underneath the zip line, and all over the Fun Facts Path) in record time.  They won tickets to free ice cream at a shop downtown for the entire summer.  But it meant far more to Cassie when Rachel ran up on their last day, friendship bracelet in hand, and tied it around Cassie’s wrist.  

**For Good**  
Cassie always knew that Crayak would find a way to get revenge against Rachel and Jake for the way they’d hurt him.  She just never imagined it would come like this: the sharp whistle of a rock in the air followed by a hideous wet _crunch_ of gristle and bone.  She never knew the fallout could be this bad, Rachel’s skin so pale it has gone a dull grey color except for the places on her hands where David’s blood seeped between her fingers.  Rachel came out of the warehouse silent and shaking, and Cassie couldn’t find it in herself to say anything.  

Not until, a hundred yards down the sidewalk, Rachel drew a sharp breath and started crying in near-silence.

“You’re right about me,” Cassie blurted, for something to say.  “I’m not strong enough.  I can’t do it.  I can’t be like you.  I’m sorry.”

Rachel whirled around, grabbing Cassie by the arm.  “That’s a _good_ thing.  Don’t be sorry.  People like me would be nothing without people like you.”  She shook herself off.  “No.  Worse.  Without you…”  She made a sharp gesture back to the warehouse.  “I’d be him.”  

“That’s not…”

“I know myself.”  She barked a laugh.  “You’re the only reason I’m still a halfway decent person.”  

Cassie did her best not to notice the splotch of David’s blood that had transferred to her arm.  “You realize it goes both ways, right?  Without you, I’d have quit years ago and left the rest of you to die.”  

**Thank Goodness**  
People cry during weddings, Cassie reminds herself.  It’s perfectly normal to be crying on her wedding day.  So what if she happens to be crying for entirely the wrong reason?  

It’s the dress.  It’s the long cakelike frills of the dress and it’s the fact that when she looked in the mirror after the stylist was done with her veil, all she could think of was what Rachel would say to see her so swankified.  It’s the way that Ronnie is so patient and kind and loving, so willing to wake Cassie from nightmares and hold her close every year on Christmas, on Victory-Earth Day, on the anniversary of the date Marco and the others were officially declared Missing Presumed Dead.  It’s the fact that he is so good to her, in a way no one else ever has been… and she still can’t bring herself to love him.

Ronnie has never lost patience, has never stopped being devoted and sweet.  He’s also never killed someone to save her life.  He’s never stood shoulder-to-shoulder and flank-to-flank with her as they marched into battle.  He’s never committed a terrible crime so that Cassie herself wouldn’t have to, and he’ll never know the terrible crimes Cassie herself has had to commit anyway.  

He never tore a piece of her heart out, either.  He never went and died on her because she couldn’t find the words to keep him here.  

Cassie lowers her veil to hide her tears, and she picks up her bouquet.  She’s as ready as she’ll ever be.

**Not That Girl**  
“And then,” Rachel said, “he showed me this spot downtown where they’re putting new tar down on a parking lot, and my god.”  She whistled between her teeth.  “You can just coast up and up until you’re _miles_ off the ground, and then you dive… And he just figured this out, all on his own.  He’s, like, some kind of genius at this.”

Cassie shifted to a more comfortable position on the end of her bed, trying to look like she was enjoying this conversation.  She got it, really she did.  Tobias had those big soft eyes—well, sometimes—and that sharp sense of humor and that knack for picking up new skills on the fly… He was sweet but also practical, melancholy but willing to be sarcastic too.

It didn’t stop her from wanting to cry sometimes when Rachel talked about him.

“Anyway, how are you and Jake?” Rachel asked, flopping over in her sleeping bag to look Cassie in the eye.

Cassie laughed, looking down.  She and Jake were experimenting.  Feeling each other out.  Hoping for a spark that would probably never come.  They were friends, and she loved him as a friend, but… But she wanted what she couldn’t have.

Because if she had it her way, Jake wouldn’t be the one who held her hand and tried to work up the nerve to kiss her goodnight.  Tobias wouldn’t be the one that put that starry-eyed smile on Rachel’s face.  Rachel wouldn’t be on the floor during their sleepovers, she’d be right next to Cassie in the bed—

“Enough about boys,” Cassie said quickly, shocked by the direction of her own thoughts.  “You want to go get some of my dad’s hot chocolate with chili powder?”  

**The Wizard and I**  
During the war, sometimes, Cassie would think back to the call she got late one night in eighth grade.  Rachel had been almost laughing as she spoke, enthusiasm bubbling through in every word.  It took Cassie a while to parse what Rachel was talking about, but finally she figured it out: Melissa’s dad had given them the number of this new organization in town, and the new organization was willing to sponsor any young athletes who joined it.  

_Sponsor_ , in this case, meant just about anything.  Mr. Chapman had assured them that student athletes who joined the Sharing could access its full resources for buying uniforms, connecting to coaches, and even meeting the big names in the field.  (“Dominique Dawes!  Amy Chow! Kerri Strug!” Rachel said, and Cassie made noises of agreement like these names meant anything at all.)  She might not have understood some of what Rachel was gushing about with competition levels and professional trainers, but she found herself grinning anyway.  It was always so cool to hear how amped Rachel got about everything from sales at Express to WNBA results, because Rachel was the kind of person who could make anything brighter or more special with the way she saw it.

They’d taken a shortcut home through the construction site the very next night.  Cassie thought of that phone call, sometimes, as the last time their future had been clear and bright and easily understood.  

**March of the Witch Hunters  
** All things considered, Cassie’s not that surprised to open her door one day eighteen months after the war ends to find Marco standing on her front doorstep.  “You heard?” he asks hoarsely.  

He’s drunk, Cassie registers with an unpleasant jolt.  Or in shock.  Or… _something_.  He’s definitely swaying on his feet, a little cross-eyed.  “It’s not your fault,” she says.

He wipes the back of one hand across his face in a harsh motion, even though there are no tears on his face.  “You opening a conversation that way doesn’t exactly make a guy feel better, you know.”

The news—if it can even be called that—was all over the TV this morning.  ANIMORPH LOVE TRIANGLE? the _Daily News_ screamed, recycling other sources’ work as usual.  Some enterprising young carrion-feeder at CNN was the one who pulled together over a dozen clips of Marco talking about Rachel, edited in such a way that they imply a very specific picture: one in which he’s in love with Rachel and ragingly jealous of Tobias.  The implication that Rachel was sleeping with them both screams from between the lines of harsh black print.

When Cassie faces the press conference that afternoon, her hands are still shaking with anger but her chin is high and her voice is level.  “How dare you?” she demands.  “How dare you pick the one person who’s not still around to defend herself and decide that she’s your latest piece of scandal?  Is that supposed to make you feel better about yourselves?”  Rachel might not be around to defend herself, but Cassie will defend her far beyond death.  She doesn’t care how long it takes, she will personally take every single reporter who repeated this news to court, and she will sue the pants off them all.  

**No Good Deed  
** Cassie was sitting on one of the low ridges of the canyon wall above the hork-bajir valley, doing her utter best not to cry, when she saw Jake and Rachel approaching her at top speed.  She took a breath to brace herself for whatever was coming.  Ax had already called her a traitor to her face today.  Marco had demanded to know what she was thinking, letting the yeerks take the morphing cube, and had responded to her answer with an ice-cold “That’s not good enough.”  Jake wasn’t talking to her at all.

As Cassie scrambled to her feet, she registered that Rachel was dragging Jake by the arm.  They both jerked to a stop a few feet away from Cassie, and Rachel released Jake to cross her arms over her chest.  “To paraphrase the stupidest cousin I have in one of his rare moments of insight,” she said, “I don’t care what your problems are.  We have zero time for your self-pity.  So you two _deal with this_.  Right now.”

Jake mumbled something, staring at the ground.

“That’s not necessary,” Cassie whispered.  “What I did—”

“Is not the shittiest thing any of us has ever done, or even anywhere close to the shittiest,” Rachel said.  “You made a bad call, yeah.  We’re paying for it.  But the thing to do now is to stop beating yourself up and start trying to fix it.  Jake’s sorry he’s been a total jerk to you, by the way, and he’ll never do it again.”

Jake jerked his head up to stare at Rachel, mouth halfway open.

“Look,” Rachel said.  “It sucks that we lost the morphing cube.  It sucks that the yeerks know who we are now.  It sucks that we lost your parents, that…”  For the first time her voice wavered, just a little.  “That my dad’s a controller by now too.”  She jabbed Jake in the chest.  “None of that is an excuse for pretending Cassie doesn’t exist.  So I’m not asking you two to, I don’t know, _get back together_ or anything.  I’m asking you to suck it up and deal with what we’ve got in front of us like freaking adults.  Okay?”

They looked at Rachel, and then, more slowly, at each other.  At the same time, they nodded.

**Popular**  
Cassie grumbled pretty much the entire five hours that she and Rachel spent at the mall picking out dresses for Marco’s dad’s wedding, but to tell the truth it was more reflex than genuine annoyance by then.  Once upon a time she’d have pulled her own hair out rather than willingly walk out of dressing room after dressing room to twirl around in silly skirts and sillier tops while Rachel eyed her critically, and yet…

And yet their friendship had grown to something deeper, more complicated, hard and battered as steel, over the course of the war.  To the point where Rachel’s mere presence was a comfort to Cassie’s ever-racing mind, no matter what they happened to be doing at the time.

And yet Cassie knew why Rachel was spending so much time on this.  It was the same reason Jake had actually taught himself how to tie a half-Windsor, the same reason Tobias had been drilling Ax in how to make small talk like a real boy all week long.  They all desperately wanted to be the best versions of themselves for Marco, knowing the special hell the wedding day would be for him.  This—weird accessories and all—was Rachel being kind and considerate for a friend.

And yet every time Rachel smiled as Cassie pushed through the curtains, or murmured “beautiful, beautiful” as she twirled in yet another ridiculous dress, Cassie felt her heartbeat speed up.  Every time Rachel’s clever fingers adjusted a strap or reached up to tuck an ornament into Cassie’s hair, Cassie felt the tingle of pleasure over every inch of her skin.  

**Defying Gravity  
** Cassie shuts her eyes and rubs at them, doing nothing to assuage their grittiness.  The Capitol Building is crowded as always with aides and tourists, but even this flow of strangers is preferable company to the man whose meeting she just left.  Cassie’s here to sign a deal with Beelzebub to keep them out of the hands of Satan, and she knows it.  The American voting public wants the hork-bajir put on a spaceship and sent “back where they came from.” Her would-be sponsor, on the other hand, has money, and power, and he wants a halfway measure: the hork-bajir would live on reservations ( _internment camps_ , a small nasty part of Cassie suspects) but they would be allowed to stay on Earth and given as many trees as they could possibly farm.  He might dress his proposals up in pretty language, but Cassie knows what he thinks: that the hork-bajir are animals, and animals should be seen and not heard.

_If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu._  He’s used that phrase more than once, every time she objects to his business contracts, his under-the-table dealings, his blatant flaunting of American tax codes to make a profit for himself.   How will she ever tell Toby?  She’s not giving up, not really, but if they fight to stay free and lose… If they keep insisting on an ideal solution instead of a compromise… It could be so much worse.  This man could protect them, assuming he keeps his word.

“Ma’am, are you okay?” says a slow Texas drawl.

Cassie opens her eyes.  The man standing across from her is clearly a tourist, wearing a t-shirt with a familiar bald eagle across the chest, emblazoned with the words _What Would Rachel Do?_  Cassie feels a chill go down her spine.  She knows the answer to that question.

“Yes,” she says.  “Where did you get your t-shirt?”

He looks confused, but starts describing a shop a few blocks down from the Mall.  She’s desperately afraid, but she can feel herself smiling all the same—she’ll have to get one for herself.  It’ll be a good totem to have in the fight ahead, because she’s about to tell the most important corporate developer in the country to shove his _internment_ proposal where the sun doesn’t shine.

**Dancing Through Life**  
They were sitting around in her barn as they had thousands of times before, but this meeting was anything but typical.  It was just her and Jake and Ax—the others were all out playing keep-away with David.  Maybe losing.  Maybe dying.  After all, they’d nearly lost Jake and Tobias both last night.

_Let my heart harden,_ Cassie thought.   _Let everything that is soft and delicate and easily damaged about me drain away, and let only anger and resolve replace it.  Give me the strength to do to David that which must be done, because god help me HE HURT RACHEL._  She wasn’t sure if she was praying, and if so to whom.  

All she knew was the sudden longing in herself to be Marco: ruthless, careless, carefree, callous.  To barrel her way through the coming days with an inappropriate joke on her lips and a world-loathing smile in her eyes.  She didn’t have it in her, but this cold-burning rage (he wanted to own Rachel, that disgusting little toad, she would make him pay, she would make sure he never got to see another day) suggested that she might be able to learn.

“I know how to handle this,” she said at last.  “All we’ll need is a Coke bottle and a couple blue Legos.”  

**As Long as You’re Mine**  
“What are we _doing_?” Rachel demanded, burying both her hands in her hair like she was trying to yank it out by the roots.  “Aliens landed in the middle of town last night, apparently more aliens are already here—Cassie, you just turned into a horse.  A HORSE!”

“Yeah.”  Cassie smiled, remembering what it had been like to sprint all-out across an infinite pasture, but then she sobered.  Rachel was right.  The andalite from last night had already died.  More people would die too, if the yeerks had their way.  This wasn’t a game, nowhere close.

“I just… I’m so angry at the yeerks.”  Rachel balled up both her hands.  “I want to kill them all for what they did.  But at the same time…  Cassie, are we nuts for even trying to fight back?”

“I think this is too big for us,” Cassie said slowly.  “I think we’re just kids, and…”  She took a deep breath.  “Everything’s going to change now, isn’t it?  Even if we choose not to act, we’re still making a choice.  We can’t go back, no matter what we do, now that we know.”

“If I choose to fight, you’ll be there with me, right?”  Rachel’s voice sounded uncertain for the first time.

“Whatever we decide, we do it together.  If you’re out, I’m out.  If you’re in… Then I guess I’m in.”

Rachel threw her arms around Cassie in a quick, impulsive hug.  “If we’re in this together, nothing really bad can happen to us.  You and me, girl.  There’s no one I’d rather have by my side.”  

**Finale**  
Ten years pass with a speed she could never have imagined.  Ten years since they lost contact with the _Rachel_ somewhere in Kelbrid space, and it felt like losing her all over again.  Nine years since a well-meaning sculptor erected a statue of the five dead Animorphs in downtown L.A., including (Cassie couldn’t help but notice with morbid amusement) room on the plinth for a sixth figure.  Eight years since, at age twenty-one, she became the youngest governor California had ever elected.  Seven years since she married Ronnie; four since she divorced him.  Thirteen years since she lost Rachel.

She’s leaning on one of the supports of the Golden Gate bridge, 700 feet in the air where only people who can turn into birds in their search for privacy can ever go, watching the fireworks over the harbor with bittersweet fondness.  It’s a long way down to the harbor, and from this height hitting the water would be like hitting concrete.  Good thing she’d have enough time to morph, if she felt like it.  And then she looks over, and Rachel is standing there to her left like it’s the most natural thing in the world.

Cassie doesn’t believe in miracles, of course she doesn’t.  She’s halfway into a morph faster than thought—but Rachel is talking.  Telling her about a thousand things (ragged rainbow bracelets, stolen homework and whispered promises, blood between their nails) only Rachel would know.  Even as Cassie watches Rachel morphs and then demorphs, just to prove who she is.

“How?” Cassie says at last, once she’s finally sure.  There are tears running down her cheeks.  She doesn’t really care.

Rachel shrugs, hair rippling in the wind.  “Toomin says I still have work to do.  Trust me, I don’t totally get it either.”

“Who’s Toomin?” Cassie asks.

“Oh man.”  Rachel laughs.  “Do you have five hours?”

Cassie realizes that she’s holding Rachel’s hand in her own.  That even though they’re standing too close to each other, so close that Rachel’s hair is blowing against her cheek, Rachel is leaning in even closer.  “Yeah,” Cassie breathes.  “I have all the time in the world.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Original post [ here](http://thejakeformerlyknownasprince.tumblr.com/tagged/wicked).


	7. What if Eva was never a controller?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [ Lwoorl](http://lwoorl.tumblr.com/) said: Do you think the animorphs could have win the war if Eva had not been taken by the Yeerks?

Eva’s right about Marco: he’s a sweet kid, even to the point of delicacy, and he has no understanding of the vileness of the world.  He’s never tasted death, never watched one parent disappear while the other decayed.  The world has not yet made him hard, has not honed the sharp edges of his mind into razors and armored spikes.

  * This time around, when they’re all standing around arguing in Cassie’s barn, Marco becomes first the one to agree with Tobias.  “Think about it, man,” Marco says, grinning at Jake.  “Turning into animals? Saving the planet? It’s like something out of a comic book.”
    * “Our parents would kill us if they knew,” Jake says slowly.
    * “That’s why they’re never gonna know,” Marco says, laughing.  “How about it, huh?  We rescue Tom, we kick butts, and depending on how that goes we’ll talk more later.”
    * After the mission goes more wrong than they ever could have imagined, after they learn what hell looks like and lose a fight against the being who rules that hell, Marco misses nearly a week of school.  His parents are worried, of course, but neither of them can get a straight answer out of him.  Marco keeps his trap shut, because he knows this much: if Tom could be a controller, then anyone could be.  
  * Still, Marco loves his friends, and he can’t let them face danger alone.  He helps them infiltrate Chapman’s house, and the construction site afterward.  He goes with them to take down the yeerks’ supply ship, grumbling the whole time about how they’re all gonna die.  He rescues Ax, and does his best to stifle the nightmares that follow their encounter with the sharks.  Each time he gets home, he’s met at the door of his house by Eva, who is growing steadily more concerned and doesn’t know what to think of his increasingly-flimsy lies.  
    * He says to Jake, “This is going to be my last mission,” and this time he means it.  They barely make it out of that mission alive, and even then only because of the grace of Visser One (whose human host is a young engineer named Allison Kim) and her ongoing conflict with Visser Three.
    * Marco quits; Jake doesn’t try to stop him.  Marco agrees to stop morphing entirely, and so he walks home—and straight into an intervention.  
  * Eva and Peter don’t know whether Marco has joined a gang, started taking drugs, fallen in with the wrong crowd, or what.  All they know is that the withdrawn silences, the nightmares, and the free-falling GPA are all recent developments.  They have questions, and they’re not letting him get away without answers.  They tell him that they’re here for him, but also that they are going to leave town to go spend some time in Eva’s sister’s cabin in the woods for the next five days, and he doesn’t have a choice in the matter.  
    * “Actually,” Marco says, “five days in the middle of nowhere sounds like the best idea I’ve heard all year.”
    * Even this kinder, gentler version of Marco is still Marco: he watches both his parents carefully for the next seventy-two hours, and can hardly believe the relief he feels when they go that entire time without leaving their tiny corner of nowheresville long enough to access a yeerk pool.  
    * When those seventy-two hours are up, Marco sends a mental apology to Jake (who, although Marco doesn’t know it, is starving out a yeerk of his own at that very time) and then starts answering his parents’ questions.  He tells them where he’s been going lately.  Why he and Jake have missed so much school in the past two months.  What the nightmares are about.  
    * Eva and Peter think he’s crazy at first, because they’re God-fearing suburban Americans who have never once considered the possibility of aliens outside of sci-fi.  They start to listen a lot more closely, however, once he morphs a wolf in front of their eyes and then changes back.  
  * When the entire family gets home and Marco discovers that his best friend spent three days as a controller in his absence, he immediately rejoins the team.  Peter disapproves sharply of Marco continuing to fight.  Eva asks Peter, tears in her eyes, what choice they have in the matter.  It’s not like the human authorities are doing anything to combat the yeerks.  It’s not like they can fight back themselves.  And so they get in the habit of sending Marco out the door (or a window) any time Jake or Cassie calls, always begging him to let them know he’s safe the instant he can.
  * Funny enough, though, they do find ways to fight back. 
    * Eva listens to their description of the Veleek in careful detail, then she loads Jake and Cassie and Marco into the back seat of her sedan and instructs them to take turns morphing.  For nearly six hours she barrels up and down Highway 1 at speeds which leave Marco shrieking in terror at the turns, playing keep-away with the tornado monster until at last Visser Three calls it home in exasperation.  
    * Peter simply hands over his laptop to Ax and asks for help in “fixing” his code for the long-distance communications array.  Ax does one better and helps him design a program which gets them a permanent connection between the andalite home world and Marco’s own living room.  He stops by to call his parents twice a week, and once a month gives carefully-edited reports on the resistance to the andalite high command.
    * At first, Eva nudges Ax into staying for dinner after his twice-weekly calls home, on the grounds that she’s never in her life seen someone eat her cooking with that much enthusiasm.  However, it’s not long before she convinces him to bring Tobias by as often as he can.  It does them a lot of good, even though neither one of them will admit it outright, to have a safe place to get inside when they need it.  
    * Eva doesn’t love it, but she starts doing a lot of the kids’ homework as well.  She always does her best to quiz them on Algebra concepts or history dates when there’s time, but she also understands that sometimes the war has to take priority.
    * Peter installs an air mattress on Marco’s floor on a semi-permanent basis, and gets in the habit of lying to Jean.  Because Jake’s just a kid, at the end of the day, and there are a lot of times at the end of the day when he’s too wrecked or exhausted from yet another mission gone bad to face the thought of lying to his family.  
  * Eva dislikes David right from the moment Marco first brings him home, but she keeps that opinion to herself.  She sits patiently through the entitled little brat asking her where she’s  _from_ (implying, of course, that “San Diego” cannot possibly be the full truth) but also tells him that if he even thinks of borrowing their phone without permission she will make him regret it for the rest of his life.  With effort she ignores his repeated attempts to undermine her authority (she’s not his  _real mom_ , as he feels the need to remind her constantly) but when she catches him stealing money from Peter’s wallet, she snaps and grounds him on the spot.
    * David immediately morphs into a lion, unsheathing hooked claws as a growl builds inside his throat.  It takes a force of will Eva didn’t even know she had, but she stares him down without flinching.  Cold sweat is running down her back, but there’s not even a trace of a tremor in her words when she orders him to demorph  _now_ , young man, in her best Mom Voice.  
    * Miraculously, he listens.  He sulks about it all afternoon, whining to Peter and to Marco (neither of whom is remotely sympathetic), but the fact is that he can’t bring himself to kill a human.  Not yet, anyway.  
    * When David disappears two days later, Eva asks Marco only once what happened.  He tells her in two or three halting sentences, and afterwards she hugs him until he finally stops shaking.  She explains what happened to Peter, and neither one of them ever brings it up again.  
  * Marco’s house becomes the natural convergence point for all their meetings.  It’s only three doors down from Jake’s house, a five-block walk from Rachel’s, and close enough to Cassie’s usual bus route that she has little trouble getting there.  They don’t really converge there for the location, though.  They come for Peter’s willingness to cobble together a fake Bug fighter distress signal on the fly, for Eva’s no-nonsense questions about whether they’re sure it’s a good idea to attack Joe Bob Fenestre’s house before they know what they’re getting into.  They come for the cinnamon cookies that Ax eats by the trayful and the links to forum discussions about the latest yeerk activity.  
    * It might be a cliché, but the truth is this: at Marco’s house they are safe.  And in that small bubble of safety, they have freedom.  The freedom to talk openly about new morphs without fear of being overheard.  The freedom to come and go through the sunroom skylight that Eva leaves open at all times.  The freedom to be vulnerable and scared and not sure where they’re going with this war.  The freedom to be kids, and to ask an adult for help.  
    * Eva talks to Rachel for nearly three hours about her own parents’ divorce, and what it was like to realize she’d probably never see her dad again.  Peter keeps a stock of paperback novels in the living room, never minding when Tobias tends to return them with talon marks in their spines.  Eva teaches Ax how to cook cinnamon cookies and churros, chicken fajitas and western omelettes.  Peter becomes ever more convincing when assuring Walter and Michelle on the phone that Cassie is simply a delight to have around as she and Marco help each other with homework.  
  * Marco kills Visser One, and Allison Kim along with her, one sunny afternoon in May.  Visser Three witnesses the whole thing, not lifting a finger to intervene.  The kids have gotten in the habit of telling Peter and especially Eva absolutely everything, but this is the one thing Marco can never bring himself to tell.  
  * The war ends eventually.  Maybe it’s not better, or worse, than it would have been if Visser One had chosen a different host.  They take longer to figure out how to defeat Visser Three without Eva’s insight to the way yeerk leadership works, but they get there in the end.  Tom dies.  Rachel dies.  James and Kelly and several thousand humans and hork-bajir and taxxons die.  Seventeen thousand yeerks meet a terrible icy death in the vacuum of space; Eva finds out about it later and can’t bring herself to disapprove.  
  * One week after Rachel’s funeral, Eva is watching Marco’s latest NBC segment when she hears a knock on the door.  Muting the TV, she goes to answer it and finds Jake on her doorstep once again.  This time he’s got a backpack over one shoulder, a worn duffle bag with the name of the basketball team that rejected him tucked under the opposite arm.  
    * “Hi,” he says softly, voice hoarse as if from tears.  “Things with my parents are kind of a mess right now, and I was just wondering…”  
    * Eva pulls the door open all the way.  “Of course, honey.  Stay as long as you’d like.”



**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The rebloggable post is [ here.](http://thejakeformerlyknownasprince.tumblr.com/post/160496243544/do-you-think-the-animorphs-could-have-win-the-war)


	8. What if Tom ended up leading the Animorphs?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Anonymous said: "What do you think would happen if Tom not Jake ended up leading the Animorphs?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Additional warnings for major character death and genocide.

  * Tom’s only at the arcade in the first place because he’s looking for Jake.  He finds Marco instead, and the two of them are talking—Marco’s noticed it too, how Jake never seems to be around these days—when Tobias jumps in to tell them that Jake’s been spending all his spare time at the Sharing lately.  Tom spots Rachel and Cassie next; at sixteen he’s trying responsibility on for size and so he announces that he’s getting them all home safe whether they like it or not.
    * Rachel protests, because of course she does, but Tom’s also the closest thing she has to an older brother and so when he puts his foot down she gives in.
    * She’s not happy about it, though, and she shows him that by charging off into the shortcut through the construction site and leaving the others to chase after.
  * The day after everything happens, Tom snaps at the others not to tell their parents, not to morph, not to _do anything_ at all until he figures out what they should do next.
    * Cassie and Tobias try morphing anyway.  Rachel starts researching ways to fight off an alien invasion.
    * Marco invites himself over to talk to Jake, who is strangely insistent on asking around about whether any of his friends believe those rumors about a UFO in the construction site last night.
  * “Your brother’s one of them,” Marco tells Tom.  The ensuing shouting match lasts almost half an hour, only ending when they both conclude the only thing for it is to go and rescue him.
  * Tom’s not Jake.  He doesn’t know a lost cause when he sees it.  He keeps right on fighting, claws bloody, bones breaking, while the others make a messy retreat.  As Jake watches from the cages, he catches a dracon beam to the head and crumples in a heap of fur next to the infestation pier.
  * This time around, it’s Marco who becomes the first one to drag them up by the bootstraps.  “There are still three of us left,” he says, “four if you count Bird Boy, although I’m not sure how much help he’ll be.  And Jake’s my best friend.  I can’t leave him in that hell.”
    * This time around, Cassie becomes the first to agree.  It’s Jake.  He means something to her that no one else ever has.
    * Rachel’s not far behind.  It’s Jake.  They spent their whole childhood doing stupid dares together, and this one seems like the biggest dare of all.
    * Tobias agrees, but not for Jake.  For revenge.  He wants to avenge Tom, who was kind to him despite not knowing him from Adam.  He wants to avenge Elfangor, who died in order to give them a chance and who told him a million things he’d never known in those last five minutes of life.  He wants to avenge that unnamed voice from his dreams, the one that haunts him still even though Marco insisted and they all agreed that the risk of a rescue attempt was too big to take.
  * Two months later, Marco tells the Ellimist, “Yeah, we want to leave with our families.  Take us away,” and without Rachel he’d never figure out why the Ellimist doesn’t listen.
  * Eighteen days after that, Marco says, “I don’t care what you think.”  He takes the Pemalite crystal and reprograms Erek so that Erek will be forced to help them.  Erek infects himself with a computer virus that corrupts all his files; two hours later he’s a lifeless pile of circuitry on the ground.
  * One month and eleven days later, Marco says, “We should just morph Joe Bob Finestre, save ourselves some time,” and refuses to listen to any contradictions.
  * One week after that, Marco says, “If we drop the instant oatmeal into the water main, everyone will have to drink it,” and doesn’t foresee the consequences.
  * Half a year after that, Marco says, “I’m sorry” just before he shoots David in the head.
  * Two weeks and four days later, Marco waits until he sees Jake leave the yeerk pool, and then he says, “Let’s blow it up.”
    * Cassie quits the team on the spot.  Tobias tries to talk him out of it, but doesn’t succeed. 
    * Four thousand three hundred human hosts die when the modified nuke Marco stole from Peter’s lab drops into the yeerk pool, because he doesn’t want to leave any chance of too many slugs escaping.  Visser One’s human body is one of them; Marco will only find this out several hours too late.
  * Three days later, Marco and Rachel steal a Blade ship.  They don’t know how to fly it, but that’s a moot point, because they get the guns working.
    * They incinerate the Pool ship, along with 20,000 yeerks and 15,000 hosts on board, and then turn to fire on the yeerk encampments on the ground.  The taxxons are annihilated, the hork-bajir-controllers as well.  Marco’s gotten used to the idea of killing humans, just as long as it’s no one he knows.
    * Tobias is outside the ship, unwilling to endorse this mission, unable to stay away.  He gets caught in the crossfire between the Bug fighters and Blade ship, spiraling to the ground, and Rachel loses her mind.
    * She and Marco are so busy trying to kill each other, fueled by grief and rage and bloodlust and terror, that at first they don’t even realize they’ve won.
  * Three days after that, Jake is free.  He doesn’t talk to Marco—neither do Peter or Cassie or Rachel—but Marco figures that’s okay, because nowadays he has plenty of fans.  Maybe the andalites are pretty strict in their control of the U.N., and maybe it sucks that humans aren’t allowed off the planet anymore, but Marco won the war.  And isn’t that the whole point of war, winning?



**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I manage to take every non-Tom-relevant prompt on the planet and make it about Tom, and then someone finally hands me a Tom-relevant prompt and I find myself killing him off during the first mission. Go figure. 
> 
> Rebloggable post [ here](http://thejakeformerlyknownasprince.tumblr.com/post/158554272309/what-do-you-think-would-happen-if-tom-not-jake).


	9. What if the Greek gods existed in this universe?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [ Darknpretty](http://darknpretty.tumblr.com/) asked for Animorphs in Percy Jackson verse.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Additional warnings in this chapter for brief gore, mentions of torture, and suicidal ideation.

Here’s the thing: they’re not demigods.  They’re not sprites or deities or blessed ones or chosen champions.  They’re just heroes, that’s all.   **  
**

**Tobias**  earns Artemis’s respect right from the start, because she knows better than anyone how to turn loneliness into strength, how to kill and hunt and provide for herself while needing no one else’s support or even their approval.  She rejoices with him over each kill and mourns with him as well, because she loves all the orphans with nothing left to lose but most of all she loves the cleanness of putting something right and doing it all by one’s lonesome.  She laughs as he leaps across the sky and clenches her fists with fierce pride every time he asserts again and again: I need no one.  I am myself, and I am free.  

Pan doesn’t come to him until later, crouched next to Tobias to whisper in his ear even louder than Taylor’s taunts, to warm more fiercely than the endless lights of the Anti-Morphing Ray.   _Don’t you give up on me, you piece of shit,_  he growls in the voice of a collapsing mountain.   _Us of lesser gods can survive anything, because we already have.  I know it hurts, you fucker, but you already have all the strength of all the ugly and broken and wild things that no human can ever love or tame._  Pan teaches him in that moment, and in a thousand thousand that will follow, that sometimes there is no need for words or norms.  Sometimes all you have to do is scream.  Sometimes you have to hammer your pain into the instrument of your enemies’ terror, and let it loose in a cry that will break the hearts of anyone who hears.  Pan shows him that pain has no words, but then neither does the feeling of the entire Earth joining together at your back to fight on your side.  

 **Marco**  wins Hermes over right from the start, with his charm and rule-bending and ability to get away with seemingly anything thanks to the sheer outrageous boldness with which he does that which he is told not to.  Hermes cultivates his self-deprecation and quick-wittedness, laughs when he triumphs and laughs even harder when he fails.  Hermes teaches him to tell the truth in such a way that no one even notices when he does, to joke of church-doors and curses even as he bleeds to death, to be all things and all people but never  _ever_  serious for long.  Through Hermes Marco learns to be faster than the bullet that would kill him, to move through all places and modes of being—even darkness, even cruelty, even ruthlessness—but never to stay for long.  Always the delicate quick-thinking ones must race ahead of their would-be killers, dodging and twisting and coming at their problems from a thousand angles, if they want to survive the war.

Apollo shows Marco how to love beauty in all its forms—male, female, in others, in himself—but above all teaches him the beauty of simple clean rules of logic applied across all situations.  He might be cold at times, might be aloof even, but he also sees all possible angles to every problem that confronts him and can offer half a dozen solutions, most of them more elegant than anyone else might come up with, in half the time it would take an ordinary kid.  Marco has a beautiful body but more importantly a beautiful mind, and Apollo cultivates that mind like a peer and a lover and a patron and a worshipper all at the same time.  

 **Rachel**  fights with Ares’s own ferocity, the terror of tyrants and the pathbreaker for her peers.  She is a creature of legend and song, a pure warrior who can strike fear into Crayak himself while even the Ellimist watches in awe.  She laughs off her own wounds and drinks in those of her enemies like mother’s milk.  Ares revels in the slaughter at her side, and swaggers at her shoulder murmuring: _You have power, power that you have killed and wounded and been wounded in turn in order to earn.  Walk with your head held high, because you deserve it._   Ares laughs with her as she kills, and he laughs with her as she dies.  There’s no such thing as a fountain of youth.  There’s only one path to immortality, and it’s fighting to your last breath.  It’s living like there’s no tomorrow because there is none.  It’s taking hundreds of the bastards with you as you go.  It’s leaving the world a safer place than it was when you entered.

For every ounce of Ares’s ferocity she possesses, Rachel also has all of Aphrodite’s poise and grace.  She can draw beauty from the most unlikely places and keep it at all costs, emerging unscathed from the hurricane and the carnage alike.  She is ethereal, untouchable, as golden and glowing as the goddess herself and as—rightfully—prideful besides.  Rachel has the instincts that tell her when a blouse is overpriced, when adjusting the curtains will draw out the beauty of a room, and it comes from her patron goddess.  After all, Aphrodite always does spare her best love for the ones who will never age or grey.   

 **Cassie**  doesn’t catch Persephone’s eye, not at first, because Persephone may love all things that grow but she also sees the pretty ones the most.  And then Cassie, eight years old and with tears striping her face, picks up a rock and crushes the skull of a suffering rabbit that was fatally injured by a passing car.  Persephone takes notice.  When Cassie saves four baby skunks and doesn’t blame Tobias for eating the fifth, Persephone watches carefully.  When Cassie coaxes David so gently to his doom, Persephone smiles just a little.  When Cassie eats a seal while its children watch, Persephone approves.  Life is death.  Cultivating a garden is a matter of loving every blossom and also knowing when to snap its neck.  Persephone is green and growth and spring, but she is also the goddess of death because she understands that these processes—growing and aging, blooming and dying—are one and the same.  Persephone may see the pretty ones first, but the ones she loves are the ones who know that all things must end, that all cycles have two sides, and that humans are ultimately not that special in the grand scheme.

Hestia’s interest in Cassie begins on those late nights spent watering horses and murmuring to sick wolves and checking on cranky eagles, but it blossoms into admiration the day that Cassie hugs Jake goodbye and chooses not to adventure.  Hestia is a one-woman army of her own, a burning homefire to her own adopted family, a brilliant brand in the darkness who never ever compromises her morals even for a second.  Hestia nurtures Cassie through the long years during which she must redefine home after everyone she loved is gone, but it is work that she is glad to do because Hestia is like Cassie in that regard: she understands that a hard day’s work is its own reward, but that a smile at the end of it is a greater reward still.

 **Ax**  comes to Gaia late, as an outsider, and she doesn’t know what to make of him at first.  In all her infinite millennia she has never had a creature quite like him running across her surface tasting the sweetness of her grass.  But he sees her in a way that none of her homegrown children ever really do, drinking in the incomprehensible richness of the millions of species she uses to populate even the meanest square of grass on the most neglected of her fields.  He speaks to her trees and drinks of her streams… and he shares her taste for vengeance as well.  Gaia can adapt and evolve, and so can Ax, but they both understand the importance of following certain rules and never losing sight of one’s heritage.  Gaia welcomes Ax and gives him a home like none he has ever known before, strange and frightening and wonderful and lonely.  He cultivates himself and his heritage under her watchful eye, and he learns to love her back even though he did not come to her by choice.

Hades is a keeper of memory the way that Ax is, sheltering him first when Ax is trapped beneath an infinite black ocean and surrounded by the dead.  Hades does not forget, and he does not forgive; every time Ax clashes with Visser Three, every time he refuses to compromise his morals to humans or to andalites, Hades is there.  Hades is a collector of rare and precious things, and he recognizes that Ax is a thing like no other.  Ax does not flinch from death, nor from killing, but he does recognize how terrible a life wasted is.  Ax can find the life in a simple sound or a beautiful food, but he never loses sight of the place that he came from.  Ax mourns his family, Ax remembers his heritage, but Ax has enough understanding of the vastness of his task as a warrior that he never allows himself to be consumed by grief.  Hades sees all, and Hades approves.

 **Jake**  springs from his cocoon of mediocre complacency the moment the war lands in his lap with a speed that reminds Athena of herself, and he wastes no time demonstrating a military spirit that proves her faith was not misplaced.  He is canny enough to maneuver seven Animorphs into the world leaders’ conference with everything from repurposed fishing weights to reverse psychology against Visser Three, but also bold enough simply to tear through problems with a rhino’s ferocity when he cannot solve them with a dragonfly’s cleverness.   He sees how the pieces—of situations, of tools, problems, of people, of teams, of empires—fit together, and how they fall apart.  Athena has fought on the shores of Normandy, in the icy waters of Trenton, on the bloody sands of Algeria, and now in the suburban streets of a California town.  War is an art, won through sacrifice and strategy and sheer cussed refusal to sink to the level of one’s enemies.  War is about victory for the sake of peace, about winning to return to the hearth, about making plowshares out of swords.  Athena fights by Jake’s side, and she considers it an honor.

Poseidon is inscrutability and depth of thought, but also rage that shakes planets and tears islands from their moorings.  Poseidon is about masculinity and pride, not the silly posturing of his younger peers but the brutal self-assurance that comes with hard-won maturity.  Poseidon recognizes himself in Jake, and though Poseidon does not ally himself with anyone, nor does he respect any mere mortal, much less admire such silly fleeting creatures, he still smiles faintly across the battlefield at a worthy opponent.  He watches the Howlers destroyed and 17,000 yeerks sucked into the unforgiving vacuum of space, and thinks that these things have earned his time long enough for him to whisper to Jake:  _The sea weathers down all things in the end, and the prettier they are the faster they fall.  But any rock that has survived a hundred storms and still stands has more dignity in its defeat than any statue or house never battered into the smooth utter essence of its being by the power of the waves._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know this one went a little off-base from the concept of Percy Jackson, but I found the idea of making the kids demigods got way too complicated very quickly. (If one of Tobias's parents is literally a god, does that by default make Ax a god too? If Cassie is Hestia's literal daughter and Jake is Athena's literal son, doesn't that make their relationship incest?) I also really like how thoroughly ordinary all of the Animorphs are pre-war, so I decided to go with the headcanon that their greatness comes first and the gods' notice comes second. Apologies for the lack of Camp Half-Blood. 
> 
> Original post [ here](http://thejakeformerlyknownasprince.tumblr.com/post/155000817364/animorphs-in-percy-jackson-verse).


	10. What if the series was set in modern times?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [ Jollysunflora ](http://jollysunflora.tumblr.com/)requested an Animorphs AU set in modern times.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Additional warnings this chapter for cyberbullying, ableism, sexual harassment, and mentions of several other kinds of stigma.

1.  _The Invasion_

  * When Cassie calls out to Elfangor, Marco whispers, somewhat hysterically, “Don’t be silly—aliens don’t speak English!  Haven’t you seen  _District 9_?  _Arrival_?  _The Avengers_?”
  * Elfangor proves them wrong, of course, but when Marco blurts out a question he merely explains (with a hint of amusement) there are some forms of communication more sophisticated than mere words.



2.  _The Visitor_

  * After Rachel sneaks back out of Chapman’s house, they listen intently to everything she describes.  
  * “So what you’re really saying,” Marco says, “Is that the yeerks have enough technology to travel between stars, create impossibly advanced illusions of just about anything, take over entire other species…  And all they did with it is make Skype 3D?”
  * “Yeah,” Rachel says, “but, like,  _good_  3D.  Not shitty have-to-wear-glasses 3D.”
  * “Nah,” Marco concludes, “still lame.”



3.  _The Encounter_

  * Rachel gets Tobias a smart watch.  She tells him it’s so that he can keep track of their time limit, but in reality she knows he’s lonely and bored out there in the woods, and at least this way she can call him.  He can answer calls and check the time if nothing else; she talks with him for almost an hour before bed every night.



4.  _The Vistor_

  * With Ax’s help, they turn off location and tracking and wifi and cookies on their phones.  After that, there are a lot fewer meetings in Cassie’s barn, a lot more group messages with carefully coded content.  
  * Tobias proves to have something of a knack for coming up with ways to talk about yeerk plans (usually disguised as discussions of video game or movie plots), suggestions of morphs slipped into long-winded anecdotes that happen to mention a single animal species by name, and meeting locations’ coordinates as extra phone numbers added to the group chat with no actual phones connected. Jake encourages them not to talk in person, once their phones are secure from traces, because it’s safer this way.



5.  _The Predator_

  * After they get back from the mission, Marco spends almost two hours scrolling through Eva’s Facebook page, forever set to In Memoriam. The messages still come in sometimes, from friends and coworkers and distant family members Marco has never met; as the page admin, he filters them all.  
  * So much wasted grief, he thinks.  So much pain and loss and longing, all of it caused by the yeerks. Sound and fury, all over a death that never happened.  
  * Helpless and sick, he writes on her wall one last time: “I love you, Mom.  I miss you.  I WILL find a way to help.”  And then he deletes the page.



6.  _The Capture_

  * “Don’t send anyone to Jake’s house,” Marco says, “it’s too risky. Instead, we just have _Jake_ …”  He gestures at Ax.  “Video-call his parents a few times a night to reassure them that he’s still doing just fine.  He's working on that project at my house and not…”  He gestures to Jake, who is currently secured to a chair with zip-ties using a technique Marco found on a Pinterest tutorial.
  * “Of all the stupid ideas you’ve come out with so far, that has got to be the stupidest,” Temrash 114 says in Jake’s voice.  “Do you seriously think my parents won’t notice anything off about Ax?  How clueless do you think they are?”
  * “They never noticed  _your_  sorry ass living in their house for the last several months,” Marco says coldly.  
  * In the end, it works, more or less.  Jake doesn’t exactly appreciate the long lecture about communication when he finally gets home, but no one asks whether he was replaced by an alien so at least there’s that.
  * The next day, Tom’s inbox displays a single new email from an anonymous sender.



7.  _The Stranger_

  * Rachel’s Instagram account is, in many ways, its own work of art. She copies down famous quotes onto post-it notes with swirling writing, multicolored pens, and even tiny illustrations crammed between the words.  She has over 5,000 followers... and she doesn’t even think about how much she’s lost interest in the project.  Not until one of her mutuals messages her to ask when she’ll start posting again.  
  * She opens her account and realizes that she hasn’t posted any new photos in almost a month.  She stares at the multipack of micro-tip Sharpies on her desk for a few minutes before, with a sigh, she shuts her laptop without responding.



MM1.  _The Andalite's Gift_

  * They don’t worry about Rachel not texting them back—after all, her gymnastics camp is way off in the mountains and it’s entirely possible she doesn’t have a cell signal there.  It’s not until Ax tracks down her phone and finds it abandoned in her bag next to the bus stop that they all start to worry.
  * There’s a weird incident with a tornado at Darlene’s house in the middle of the Rachel crisis, but after the twenty-third different cell phone video of the incident gets uploaded to YouTube, the bizarre dust storm made of tiny mouths disappears into thin air and no one hears about it again.



8.  _The Alien_

  * “I don’t think I can do yeerk pool reconnaissance tonight,” Rachel says.  “Too much homework.”
  * Ax sighs loudly. <Boo, you whore.> 
  * There’s a very long pause.  And then Tobias says, <Okay, that’s it, I’m deleting your tablet’s Netflix app.>
  * <I much prefer YouTube anyway,> Ax says cheerfully.  <It has those shorter messages which play before the main video, and often concisely describe goods or services you can purchase through the use of bitcoins or other human currency.  Did you know that those messages change so that their information reflects your preferences for different types of internet content?  So informative!  So considerate!>



9.  _The Secret_

  * The six of them spend over nine hours in the woods, morphing and demorphing and morphing and demorphing to try and keep their phones with them.  It shouldn’t be that different from morphing minimal clothing, especially not when (for instance) Rachel has her phone taped tightly to the inside of her arm, but even Cassie can’t manage it.  By the end of the exercise they’re exhausted, frustrated, and still short one solution for how to prevent Jake’s parents from freaking out when he regularly goes for several hours at a time without texting them.  



10.  _The Android_

  * “It’s really simple,” Marco says.  “When it comes to resources, there’s a clear power difference here.  I mean, seriously.  If you only had to bet on one horse, wouldn’t you bet on the one that owns half the planet?”
  * “It’s not about who has more toys.”  Jake shakes his head.  “It’s about doing what’s right.  And sometimes that means breaking the law.”
  * Marco throws up his hands.  “There’s nothing  _right_ about Captain America starting a freaking war just because he doesn’t like Iron Man’s law!  Anyway, what does he hope to accomplish outside of tearing the Avengers apart? He’s got, what, Hercules, Ronan, half a dozen other B-listers on his team?  Does he seriously think he can take on Black Widow  _and_ Ms. Marvel  _and_  like 700 Thunderbolts?”
  * Jake rolls his eyes.  “I think you’re forgetting that the Anti-Reg team has Luke Cage, Black Panther, Storm,  _and_  Daredevil.  Sometimes the battle itself is worth fighting, because the alternative is allowing a huge injustice to stand.  When the mob and the press and the whole world tell you—”
  * “Don’t go quoting the River of Truth speech at me.  We were having a perfectly civil conversation here!”



11.  _The Forgotten_

  * Rachel uploads a cell phone video of Jake and Cassie square-dancing to Facebook.  Jake leaves dire warnings in the comments section, but Cassie gives it a thumbs-up and he stops threatening to murder his cousin.  



12.  _The Reaction_

  * “It’ll be okay,” Cassie mutters, “Just as long as my mom doesn’t start talking about Nice With Altruism.”
  * “What’s Nice With Altruism?” Rachel asks.
  * “You know, that one band with the initials NWA?  The one whose iTunes album popped up on my mom’s credit card bill?”
  * Rachel’s eyes widen in comprehension.  “Cassie, you minx!”



13.  _The Change_

  * Tobias becomes a grand master at taking out drones.  Each time he manages to snatch one out of the air he immediately dives, hurling it toward the ground at the last second as he flares and swoops away from the metal and plastic exploding on the pavement below.  Afterwards, he brings the broken pieces to Ax for dissection like a housecat bringing home kills to a proud parent.  
  * Some prove to be yeerk drones (spy cameras or hunter-tracker bots), some are purely human (neither of them exactly feels guilty about destroying some rich creepers’ toys) and some are disguised as human devices but with yeerk tech inside (“like a human-controller!” Marco says, and no one laughs at his joke). The yeerks notice that their spy bots disappear all the time, of course, but can’t do anything about it short of sending an entire helicopter to check on that one section of woods.  



14.  _The Unknown_

  * After Cassie posts her first and only Facebook selfie, brand-new Aeropostale outfit and all, Marco writes a fifteen-sentence treatise in the comments section to the blinding power of her beauty, which has stabbed him through the heart following this magnificent transformation.
  * “How much money did Rachel add to your Steam Wallet to get you to do that?” Cassie asks him in Messenger.
  * “$10,” Marco tells her.  “Would have done it for 5.”
  * Jake, meanwhile, likes Cassie’s photo.  After a minute he goes back and changes the thumbs-up to a heart. Then he panics, and changes his “love” back to a “like.”



15.  _The Escape_

  * “So we can’t morph brain-control chips,” Rachel says, “and we can’t morph cell phones.  Maybe it’s just that we’re not allowed to morph technology?”
  * <That doesn’t make sense at all,> Ax says.  
  * “Do you have a better explanation?” Marco snaps, more harshly than he means to.  It's been a really long day.
  * <No,> Ax admits.  <But yours makes no sense.>
  * Rachel claps her hands.  “Too bad.  That’s the one we’re going with.”



16.  _The Warning_

  * “I lost my phone,” Jake tells his mom for the third time that year. This time around he’s even telling the truth.  Nevertheless, she grounds him.  He sneaks out anyway.  She grounds him more when she catches him, and he waits until the middle of the night before he once again sneaks out.  He starts timing their fights so that, when he has to disappear from all text contact, she mistakes it for the silent treatment.  He hates himself a little more every time it happens.



17.  _The Underground_

  * “Send help!” Marco texts to Rachel.  “I told my dad that I bought so much oatmeal because it was gluten free, and now he has us BOTH on this stupid fad diet.”    



18.  _The Decision_

  * When getting new shoes, new clothes, or food on the fly, Ax always buys for them.  He does something with his home computer that allows him to literally make his own bitcoins, and so for now the limits of his bank account are nearly infinite.  One of these days he’s going to get his accounts shut down by the NSA, but for now he’s (as Marco says) the team's sugar daddy.



MM2.  _In the Time of the Dinosaurs_

  * “You know what’s not fair?” Marco calls over the building storm.  
  * Jake sighs.  “The fact that we’re out here at all?”
  * “No!” Marco gestures over at where Rachel and Cassie have both kicked off their boots—Uggs and Timberlands, respectively—and are starting to morph with the rest of their clothes still on.  “How come the girls get to wear yoga pants and camisoles in public, while if we tried that same look we’d be the laughingstock of Reddit in less than an hour?”
  * “Because,” Rachel calls back, voice dangerously sweet, “if those of us who aren’t cis dudes can’t get equal pay, reproductive rights, the ability to choose our own standards of appearance, or a say in Congress, then the least we deserve are a few consolation prizes.”



19.  _The Departure_

  * The Amber alert for Cassie and Karen floods the town, and for the next ten days until they’re found, the rumors fly throughout the school.  Brittany’s friend Alice heard on their school’s message board that Cassie killed herself.  T.T. was texting Andy, who said that Beth’s mom works for the school and she heard that Cassie kidnapped Karen.  An anonymous tip to the local police website posts a blurry photo of what appears to be a half-eaten body with some hysterical story about an escaped jaguar.
  * Rachel punches her classmate Allison for sharing a post which speculates that Cassie ran away from home to marry a guy twice her age she met on Tinder.  Allison tattles immediately, since (she tearfully tells Chapman) it’s not like she  _wrote_ the post; she was just sharing it.
  * Jake’s science teacher confiscates his phone after she catches him using it to watch a video in class.  However, after she discovers that he’s live-streaming footage of a Monarch butterfly chrysalis, she decides it’s probably educational and gives the phone back without even a demerit.
  * An anonymous post to their school’s confession board shows a cropped photo of Cassie, with text written over it: “Apparently, you have to disappear into thin air to get noticed around here.  I wish someone would pay this much attention to me.” Rachel recognizes the handwriting as Melissa Chapman’s.  



20.  _The Discovery_

  * David leans in close to whisper to Marco.  “It’s cool, see?  I figured out how to make sales on the dark web using information I got off my dad’s computer, and once I had a buyer I just emailed the guy to negotiate—”
  * “You sent him an  _email_?” Marco’s voice gets a lot higher. “From your home computer?  Please tell me you’re not actually that stupid.”
  * Later that afternoon, the Animorphs assemble in the bushes outside David’s house.  <The yeerks have his location, and they’re coming now,> Jake tells them.  <So we break in, grab who we can, and run for it.> He hesitates, and then adds, <If we can only save one, the priority is David.>



21.  _The Threat_

  * Jake is mid-mission on CounterStrike with David, not actually giving a damn about firing imaginary weapons at imaginary terrorists but trying to bond with the new guy in TeamSpeak, when David says, “Man, that carry. You’re awesome at this!  I bet you’re way better than Rachel, and she was bragging up and down about allegedly knowing shooters so well.  I hate fake geek girls like that, always talking about their lame records.  It’s like, go back to Animal Crossing!”
  * Jake straightens up in his seat, not even noticing when blood fills the center of the screen as he meets a messy end.  “Actually,” he says slowly, “Rachel kicks my butt every time we play this.  She’s right that she’s got a knack for it.”
  * “Ouch.”  David laughs. “Must hurt, getting owned by a girl.”
  * Jake forces a laugh of his own.  “Yeah, but at least she doesn’t gloat about it like Marco does.”
  * “Last time a girl thought she could beat me at this game, I doxxed the shit out of her.”
  * “You did  _what_?” Jake demands.
  * “Chill.  It’s not like I hurt her or anything.  Me—and a bunch of other guys who got her info—were just sending the message that we saw through her bullshit and we weren’t going to stand for it.  Not my fault she was too lazy to VPN.  She probably even learned something from the experience.”
  * Jake doesn’t say anything.  He feels a little sick to his stomach.
  * David laughs, too high, too late.  “I’m kidding, man.  Kidding. I wouldn’t actually do that. Swatting, on the other hand…” There’s something calculating in the tone of his voice. “Better watch out, man.  If you have a dog, the cops shoot it on their way in the door.  Just saying.”
  * “I should probably get to bed,” Jake says.
  * “Jeez, I’m still joking!  Come on, can’t you take a stupid joke?”
  * “Apparently not.”  Jake quits the game before he gets a response.  



22.  _The Solution_

  * Rachel comes out of the bathroom to find her phone has a text alert telling her that she has several new picture messages.  The most recent photo—the first one she sees—isn’t sent to her phone, but sent _from_ it.  It just shows a tiny bit of the curve of her back and her head wrapped in a towel, but it was taken less than five minutes ago.
  * Hands shaking, face dead-white but fists clenched in rage, she scrolls up through the photos.  All are of her, most taken from oblique angles.  When she gets to the first one taken, of Jordan still asleep in bed some time last night, she has to run back into the bathroom to puke her guts out into the toilet.
  * “How do you like me now?” says the accompanying text message.
  * “I will tear your fucking head off with my claws, and I will enjoy it,” she sends back to David.



23.  _The Pretender_

  * For his fourteenth birthday, Rachel gets Tobias a tablet which has been specially adapted to be easier for people with arthritis to use; after some experimentation, she and Cassie have figured out it’s not that hard to use with a beak and talons.  He downloads Rick Riordan and Scott Westerfeld novels to read when he gets bored during the day.  At night, he’ll often put on Ellie Goulding’s music, turned down so low that it would be undetectable to human ears, and he’ll fall asleep to the soft flow of her voice.  



24.  _The Suspicion_

  * “If you couldn’t even be bothered to take a picture of the thing, can you at least tell me what kind of toy space ship we’re talking about?” the guy in the shop says. “ _Rogue One_?   _Endurance_?   _Axiom_?”  
  * “Sort of like the  _Prometheus_ ,” Rachel says, “with those engines on the sides?”
  * “Yeah, but with a big thruster in the back like  _Serenity_  has,” Jake adds.  “And flat on top, like…”
  * “Like a helicarrier!” Cassie suggests.  
  * “Yep.”  The guy nods. “I know exactly which one you mean.”



25.  _The Extreme_

  * “Jeremiah,” Marco says. “What a beautiful name for a beautiful young man.”  
  * Jeremiah looks a little startled, but he leans against the locker door anyway to look at Marco through his eyelashes.  “Do you like organic food truck rallys?” he asks.
  * “I love organic food truck rallys!” Marco enthuses.
  * After securing a place and a time, Marco googles “food trux rallie + organic” to find out what he just got himself into.
  * “So much gluten free quinoa!” he texts Jake an hour into the date. “Such cultural appropriation!  SO MANY FAUX HIPPIES!  Send help.”
  * Jake, being the true bro that he is, fakes an emergency call and rescues Marco from an impending granola overdose.



26.  _The Attack_

  * “I don’t think I like this section of Minecraft very much,” Marco says shakily. 
  * Jake rubs a tired hand over his face, looking around the brilliantly stacked Iskoort world for any sign of Howlers.  “Same.  I could kill for a cup of black coffee right now.  And I don’t even like the taste of coffee.”
  * Rachel turns around, slowly taking in his artistically-faded designer shorts and flannel-patterned t-shirt.  “You are such an incredible hipster I cannot believe we’re even related,” she says.  



27.  _The Exposed_

  * “So,” Jake asks as they head for the beach, “What do we know about giant squids so far?”
  * <Apparently,> Ax says, <giant squids are gay.  Not just a subset of the population as would normally occur, but every single member of the species.  Which raises several fascinating questions about their system of reproduction, and has important implications for our understanding of squid gender. However, the source of this information also informed me repeatedly that giant squids had copulated with my mother, which leads me to believe that this was partially a case of mistaken identity.>
  * After a very long pause, Tobias becomes the one to bite the bullet.  <Ax, buddy, where did you go to look for information about giant squids?>
  * <Initially, I posted an inquiry to an online platform known as Reddit which frequently encourages questions.  However, I was then approached by several individuals from a website called 4Chan…>
  * <Do me a favor and  _please_ don’t judge our entire species based on anything you saw there,> Tobias begs.
  * They walk for several more minutes in shocked silence, and then Marco says, “O- _kay_!  Who wants to know what  _I_ learned about giant squids off Wikipedia?”



28.  _The Experiment_

  * “Ax,” Marco says, “How come you can roll out ‘venti dulce de leche dark-chocolate frappuchino extra whip’ without batting an eye, but you giggle every time you have to say the word ‘soy’?”
  * “It has so many vowel—owl?—sounds, in so little space,” Ax says.  “That long sssssssssss, so pleasant on the tongue, but then that odd oooyyy ooy-yah?  All in the back of the mouth.  Very strange.  Sssoooy.  Ssususs-oooyaaa.”
  * “Also, he’s moved on from the frappuchinos,” Tobias adds.  “Now he keeps spending all our hard-stolen bitcoins on espresso mack… mach…”
  * “Espresso macchiato con panna,” Ax explains.  “Doppio.”



29.  _The Sickness_

  * Cassie feels herself sweating as she props the laptop across the room from her, tools laid out and Ax unconscious on the table.  She didn't really expect to find a YouTube tutorial with life hacks for _brain surgery_ , but this is the best she can do.  To be honest, it’s actually about “how neurosurgeons perform an orbitozygomatic craniotomy,” not intended to be a how-to manual, but under the circumstances she doesn't really have any other options, and so she’ll follow along for now.



MM3.  _Elfangor's Secret_

  * “ _That’s_ the kind of strong leadership we need.”  Jake gestures to the full-color television (this year’s latest model) where a program of their current leader plays on a loop.  “Keeping the filth and the freedom-haters out of this country, saving America for the right kind of Americans.”
  * “Yeah, yeah, whatever,” Rachel says.  She and Tobias and Jake are the only three Animorphs, except when Melissa joins them sometimes, and listening to their “Supreme Leader” blather on gets old sometimes.  “All I want to know is whether it’s true that within a few years people will really have phones that plug into their cars.  That’d be cool.”
  * Tobias rubs his eyes against the silk of his wing feathers.  They itch constantly, since he doesn’t have a gas mask to wear every time he goes out into the pollution-opaque air outside the way that his human friends do.  Jake and Rachel take bets sometimes, idly, brutally, about whether he’s the last raptor left on the face of the planet.
  * “Magnificent!”  Drode appears in their midst, and both the Berensons immediately point automatic rifles at his head.



30.  _The Reunion_

  * Marco is lying on his bed the day after watching Eva fall, staring at a patch of wall above his dresser, when he registers that his phone has been buzzing for a while now.  It goes off so many times he assumes he has to be getting a call, but when he checks his notifications he just discovers he’s gotten seventeen text messages in the last hour.  
  * The first is from “Smurfette,” and says “Did you know that there is a type of food that involves baking a cinnamon bun inside of a donut?  We must secure as many of these as it is possible for a human to consume, as soon as possible!”
  * The next one, from “Hawkgirl,” reads: “found out recently that apparently ax still thinks you invented flea powder.  i told him that if youd invented flea powder wed all be a lot richer right now.”
  * “Team Dad” (not to be confused with “Real Dad,” which is how Marco lists Peter) sent along several invitations to team missions on League of Legends this afternoon, along with a threat to give Cassie the password to Marco's account (which is not as clever as Marco thinks it is) if Marco doesn’t join in.  “we both know that by the time you get back she’ll have trained it to apologize automatically for stabbing people,” Jake adds.
  * One of the many texts from “Julia Butterfly Hill” suggests that Jake has underestimated Cassie’s diabolical streak, because it’s a screenshot of Tristana equipped the same way as his own which has had its name changed to HarambeWasFramed.
  * The real surprise, however, is the single text from “Xena: Warrior Princess.”  It’s a link to an article about a disaster in the local national park and the efforts to clean up the wreckage of an as-yet-unidentified craft which went down in the canyon.  Marco has to read it a few times to understand the point she’s making, because it’s all about what’s _not_ there: the article makes no mention of any human bodies being found among the wreckage.  
  * Marco gets halfway through typing a reply to them all which informs them in no uncertain terms that he sees through their transparent attempts to cheer him up and doesn’t appreciate it, but he deletes without sending.  He can practically hear his mom’s voice saying it: he can focus on the fact that he’s still surrounded by people who love him, or he can focus on the negative side of everything.  And being constantly negative is no way to live.  



31.  _The Conspiracy_

  * “Sharing this again, because its been 3 months,” Jake’s cousin Brooke posts on Facebook.  “Anyone who has any news at all about Saddler, no matter what it is, PLEASE contact my family.  Big brother, I dont know if youre still out there, but I miss you.  I miss you like crazy.”
  * Jake turns up his Spotify’s Offspring channel a little louder to drown out the sounds of Tom and his dad shouting at each other downstairs.  His eyes flinch past Brooke’s post, but they can’t move fast enough to prevent the thought that flashes across the surface of his mind:  _Is this going to be me a year from now?  
_



32.  _The Separation_

  * Tobias texts Rachel and Jake an article from Audubon.Org, where several birdwatchers are going into ecstasies of scientific fascination at the bald eagle and peregrine falcon seen flying in close formation in a cell-phone video taken near a highway overpass downtown.  His only comment is, “Told you so.”



33.  _The Illusion_

  * In the aftermath of the mess with Taylor and the AMR, Rachel does a Google search: “PTSD treatment symptoms outcomes.”  She reads through the WebMD site, the NIMH page, the Wikipedia link to a DSM-5 entry.  
  * She thinks of Tobias’s withdrawn silences, his antipathy toward so much they used to enjoy, but she thinks of other things as well.  How exhausted Jake seems any time they’re not on-mission.  How badly Cassie flinches when the school bell rings and doors slam.  How Ax seems to be gradually losing interest in the things—cooking shows, new condiments, human history trivia, These Messages—that once drew his fascination.  How last week Marco flicked an ant off the back of his hand and then went white like he’d just kicked a puppy.  How good it had felt when she’d hurt David, spreading the pain around, giving it back.
  * She catches an Uber to the clinic downtown, filling out forms in the waiting room based on the checklist written on her phone for “how to get tobias an ssri”: Yes, she often feels tense and worried.  Yes, her heart often races for no reason.  No, she hasn’t thought of ending her life.  No, she doesn’t feel out of control when she eats.  
  * She gets as far as developing a cover story—it’s about how she’s never felt the same since her parents’ divorce—but in the hallway to the office she panics and calls Cassie.  “Am I doing the right thing?” she asks, after she’s explained.
  * Cassie is silent for a long time, never a good sign.  “I’m not sure an SSRI would work on a bird,” she says at last, “and that’s even if we could figure out a dose that would work without killing him.  I know you want to help, and I think you should, but…”
  * Rachel hears what she’s not saying: but what if her mom asks too many questions?  But is this risk really worth it?  But what if the psychiatrist (the receptionist, the pharmacist) is a controller?  But isn’t it them, and only them, against the world, and isn’t that just how it has to be?
  * “The war won’t last forever,” Cassie says weakly, and Rachel hates her a little for it.  “When it’s over, when we get to tell everyone what’s happening…”
  * Rachel hangs up.  She goes home, morphs, and flies out to the woods.  
  * <You know I love you, right?> she asks Tobias later that evening.
  * <Of course I do.>  
  * He sounds exhausted.  She’s never felt more helpless in her life.



34.  _The Prophecy_

  * The Yeerk Peace Movement, as it comes out, has a Twitter feed.  It is rather painfully obvious that it has been set up and run entirely by aliens who are doing their _very best_ to communicate with humans, and not quite succeeding. Most of the posts are couplets, for some reason that none of the Animorphs can fathom.  
  * “Want to be On Fleek? When you see someone’s rights threatened, speak!”
  * “Don’t be a Belieber anymore - end slavery and even the score.”
  * “#tbt: Remember when we were symbiotes?  Give taxxon freedom your sympathy votes!”
  * “Nickelback is super lame, and keeping involuntary hosts is just the same.”
  * “Respect your host’s rights today, and make your human into your bae!”



35.  _The Proposal_

  * It’s Marco who comes up with the idea for how to take down William Roger Tennant.  This is a guy, after all, whose cockatiels have their own Instagram account: he runs his fame on the internet.  
  * “It’s simple,” Marco explains. “We start a hashtag—#notsonicetennant—and we make it go viral.  All we have to do is film this guy  _everywhere_  he goes, and eventually the yeerk will slip up.”
  * It proves not to be simple after all.  Their gif of Tennant twitching madly mid-EPA speech gets overshadowed by the news story about One Direction nearly getting poisoned with spiders at the same banquet. Ax does not understand the concept of hashtag, and keeps adding #notsonicetennant to his retweets of what Marco calls “food porn.” They train one of Tobias’s repurposed GoPros to follow poodle-Marco, but that becomes a meme mocking the world’s most obnoxious stray dog rather than Tennant himself.
  * The plan finally,  _finally_  comes off when they pull out all the stops and just confront him in morph.  The smartphones that Rachel rigged up in the surrounding buildings don’t pick up the private thought speak they're using, but the audio of Tennant screaming at the aliens to leave him alone comes through just fine.
  * When the scandal breaks, the internet (in truly predictable fashion) drops #notsonicetennant and starts using #tennantgate instead.  
  * Ax reposts an old photo of Tennant eating a quinoa salad—zoomed in on the salad—and tags it #tennantgate.  All of his teammates assure him they appreciate the attempt.



36.  _The Mutation_

  * “All right, that’s just weird,” Marco says, looking at the final entry in the underwater creepshow they’ve been walking through for the past hour.  “All the other ships have been getting more modern as we’ve gone, but this one?  Looks like it was made in the sixties, at the latest.”
  * <The world’s creepiest museum curators are getting sloppy with the placement of bodies as well,> Tobias points out.  <There’s no way that many people could fit on a boat that small.  They’re practically falling over the sides.>
  * Jake and Cassie look at each other, seeing the same realization reflected in each other’s eyes.  Neither one of them wants to say it out loud.
  * Jake becomes the one to give it voice.  “Don’t you get it?”  He points to the ragged clothes, the emaciated bodies, the modern smartphone tucked in among the antiquated radio equipment.  “They were refugees.”



37.  _The Weakness_

  * Rachel shuts the window on the library computer as soon as she hears someone walk into the room, but she can tell she was too late by the look on Jake’s face when she turns around.  
  * “Roy Ludvig, huh?” Jake says.  “Heck of a name.”
  * “He was at the T.V. studio when we attacked.”  Rachel looks down, picking at her nail polish.  “No civilians were supposed to be in danger.”
  * Jake’s expression softens, as much as it ever does.  “And now you’re scrolling through his Facebook, looking for something that’ll let you sleep at night.”  
  * “He’s got a grandson,” Rachel blurts.  “Jordan’s age.  He…”  She stops.  He’s dead, and it’s more or less her fault.
  * “Shouldn’t be looking on Facebook.”  Jake sets his phone on the library table next to her, taps the screen to bring up an official-looking report.  “You should be, say, borrowing my dad’s computer.  Sending an email from his account to ask for the guy’s medical records.  If you had, you’d know that Mr. Roy Ludvig had a heart condition.  That he had maybe a year to live, at most, and doctors said he might die at any old time.”
  * Rachel looks down at the report for a long time, and eventually looks up at Jake.  “Doesn’t make it okay, what I did,” she says.  “He’s still dead.”
  * Jake shrugs.  “You don’t have to forget it ever happened, but you do have to live with it.  Live, and fight another day.”



38.  _The Arrival_

  * In the aftermath of Estrid’s visit, Tobias is flying over the boardwalk when he sees a henna artist who clearly smokes way too much pot to be a controller. He gets Ax, they morph human, and both get henna tattoos of Elfangor’s name. (Ax had previously expressed an admiration for the human tradition of commemorating a lost loved one by making markings on one’s body.) They know the tats will disappear when they demorph, but they’re both glad they did it.
  * The artist asks how long they’ve been together, and Tobias says in a scandalized voice, “he’s my UNCLE!” Thus, Tobias succeeds in both of his goals: making Ax laugh, and reminding him he has family here on Earth.
  * Honestly, the reminder doesn’t hurt Tobias either.



39.  _The Hidden_

  * “You know, not  _all_  squirrels are like that,” Marco is fond of saying after a morph goes wrong.  “Not all termites are horrifying worker drones.”  Sometimes it’s, “You know, some of my best friends are fleas.”
  * It’s Cassie, however, who gets the last laugh out of that one.  <You know, Marco,> she says as they swim away from the wreckage of the helicopter, <Not  _all_  ants are killers, right?  There are some perfectly nice ants out there, and I really shouldn't judge ants on the actions of a few psycho ants.  Right?>
  * Marco stares at her in silence while the others snicker, watching him war between the two impulses: to keep the joke going forever, and to express his honest hatred of ants.  
  * <Come on.> And now Rachel has joined in on the teasing.  <You’re just going to let that kind of besmirching of the ant community stand?>
  * <Okay, okay!>  Marco gives in.  <Ants suck.  Yes, all ants!>



40.  _The Other_

  * “Our experts have examined the video extensively, and near as we can conclude, this footage is genuine and unedited,” the newscaster says.  “Given how viral this video has proven to be, with over two million views since it was posted to YouTube on Wednesday, everyone wants to know: is this footage proof that aliens exist?  Is this a publicity stunt for the upcoming  _Fantastic Beasts_ sequel?  Or, as one YouTube commenter asks, did a Smurf just have sex with a centaur?”
  * <Potential new ally?> Tobias suggests.  He’s already tapping out a search for the original video of the andalite in his modified tablet.
  * Ax laughs.  <Of course not.  He’s crippled.  A  _vecol_.  Useless.  We must respect the privacy of his isolation. >
  * “You know what?  Fuck that,” Marco snaps.  He shoves to his feet, posture tight with anger.  “Just… Fuck that,” he tells Ax.  “I have ADHD.  Attention Deficit whateverthefuck.  I take a  _pill_  every morning to help me  _function_  because my brain isn’t good enough to filter stimuli all by itself.  I got a fucking 135 on the world’s most boring IQ test and I’m  _still_  failing half my classes.  I’m a  _vecol_.  You think I’m useless, huh?  You gonna start refusing to talk to me because of some bullshit about ‘respecting’ my ‘privacy’?  Huh?”
  * <That’s different,> Ax says.  <You’re not…>  He doesn’t seem to know how to finish that sentence.
  * <If he’s an exception, I hope I am too,> Tobias says more gently.  <I got screened for anxiety disorders as a kid, and I guess we’ll never know if I qualify or not, ‘cause my aunt decided that doctors cost money and if the test said I needed one then she didn’t want to know about it.>
  * Ax doesn’t answer for a long time.  He doesn’t seem to know where to look.  
  * <Let’s go tell the others what we found.>  Tobias taps a button to send the video to himself.  <We can talk more about this later.>



MM4.  _Back to Before_

  * Tobias flinches when his phone makes the small  _ping_  sound that means he has an alert.  The new kid is the easy target in every school on the planet.  He wonders what it’ll be this time: another Facebook post where the semi-anonymous account Toby IsALoser tags him in another meme about how he has to pay people for sex because the sight of his body would make any normal girl run away screaming, another unnamed Instagram ping telling him he should kill himself so that no one has to look at his stupid fat face anymore, another Snapchat image of a puddle of vomit with the caption “me when I think of you,” an email with the most disgusting gif anyone could find after a quick search…
  * It’s not, though.  It’s an invite to join a private Facebook group, called The Sharing, with several hundred local members.  Most of the names Tobias recognizes are cool older kids from the high school.  Intrigued, willing to trust for the moment that this isn’t some ridiculously elaborate prank, Tobias clicks “join.”  



41.  _The Familiar_

  * Jake looks around at the enormous open field, concrete pitted with openings and low hovels of corrugated steel and rebar.  He can see for nearly half a mile in every direction before the smog makes it impossible, and the tallest things around are the hunched hork-bajir.  “Where are we?” he asks.
  * Cassie frowns.  “This?  Jake, this is downtown Manhattan.”
  * He gapes at her.  “What happened to it?”
  * “Tall buildings are targets for drone strikes,” she says casually, turning away.  “The only way to be safe anymore was to go underground.”



42.  _The Journey_

  * Marco doesn’t bother going to the house of the guy who photographed them, nor does he try to catch the kid before he uploads the video anywhere.  Instead he waits for the image to appear on YouTube, then becomes the first commenter.  “Sweet manip!” he says.  “Is that Photoshop, or can you do that in free programs like Gimp?”



43.  _The Test_

  * “EarthIsOurs-dot-tumblr-dot-com?” Marco says incredulously.  “What does Taylor do there, post pictures of her pet taxxon?  Reblog plans for planetary domination?”
  * <Judging from her archive history, she’s had this blog for many years,> Ax says.  <She recently changed the domain name, but some of the content on here is from as early as 2008.>
  * Jake and Marco get caught up in debating with Cassie about what exactly to send to her, but Tobias just scrolls quietly through Taylor’s old posts.  She didn’t lie about being beautiful, he realizes, or about being popular.  There’s a long blank period in her tumblr account in mid-2014.  And then she posted one selfie—just one—after the fire.
  * He can’t bring himself to read the names that the trolls call her, or the discussions about how much money they’d have to be paid to have sex with her.  But there’s no overlooking the suggestions that she kill herself.  The posts are too numerous, too vitriolic.
  * “Every chick ever to wander onto the internet has gotten that crap,” Rachel says; clearly she’s been reading over his shoulder.  “She should’ve developed thick skin, not joined the Sharing.”
  * Tobias thinks of the Facebook page made at his old school just to discuss the fact that he’s a chubby zit-face, of the posts which eventually overwhelmed his Instagram with death threats.  <Yeah, I guess,> he says.



44.  _The Unexpected_

  * It takes a long time for Cassie to get home from Australia, but at least her friends are not too worried for most of that time; she texts them her location and a brief description of the insanity that landed her in the Outback as soon as she gets in contact with Yami’s family.



45.  _The Revelation_

  * “None of this makes any sense,” Peter says.  “I’m hallucinating, or you’re delusional, or else—”
  * Marco sets his phone in Peter’s lap. “Check the timestamp, Dad.  I took that six months ago.”
  * Peter stares at the phone for a long minute, and then slowly looks up at Marco.  At a clear loss for words, he tilts his head back toward the screen.
  * “I know.”  Marco laughs, the sound wet with tears.  “That blond wig looks terrible on her.  But it’s really her, Dad.  I swear.”



46.  _The Deception_

  * “So they’re going to get the U.S. embroiled in  _another_  war,” Marco says.  “And this one with a country that can actually fight back.”
  * <Seems like,> Tobias says.  <Only why bother with all the secrecy and political wrangling?  Why not just send a couple mean tweets to Donald Trump and Kim Jong-Un?  That’d probably do the job just as well.>
  * “No, it wouldn’t.”  Jake runs a hand through his hair, looking around at them all.  “The yeerks need a total war.  Everything the U.S. and its allies can pull out, against everything China and its allies can muster.  Our military has gotten too used to sending drones to fight its wars, to ‘tactical strikes’ against insurgents.  If the yeerks want half the species annihilated, they have to do a lot more than poke a couple of egos.”



47.  _The Resistance_

  * “News flash,” Marco says.  “Your average suburbanite ain’t gonna accept a seven-foot-tall alien for a neighbor.  You know the number of times my mom’s been asked for proof of citizenship before she was allowed to vote or cash a paycheck or buy a car?  How many times she’s been pulled over by cops while driving the speed limit with her seatbelt on?  And she’s a regular old human being.  Toby’s right—the hork-bajir have a whole other fight coming their way if we ever manage to win this war.”  



48.  _The Return_

  * Rachel feels the blood drain from her face when she opens the Facebook message and sees the name attached.  David’s Facebook account has been defunct for almost two years now; there’s no one left who would want or even be able to access it from the outside.  Should be no one.
  * _Miss me?_ the message from David’s account says.
  * _Who are you?_  she types with shaking fingers.   _What do you want?_
  * _I know what you did.  I’m coming for you.  I’ve got friends all over the place and they’ll find you.  They’ll kill you.  Amazing the allies you can get, when you know where the bodies are kept.  On the internet, no one knows you’re a—_
  * Rachel hits “block.”  She tells herself that the screaming nightmares she has all that night and into the next are the product of having a stressful life, she’s an Animorph for pete’s sake.
  * She doesn’t stop shuddering every time she gets a message for the next two weeks, but she never hears from  _whoever_  (It wasn’t David. It couldn’t have been.) it was ever again.



49.  _The Diversion_

  * They stagger away from yet another hopeless fight, all of them injured, half of them missing limbs or bleeding to death.  Dragging their damaged bodies behind the first dumpster they find, they demorph, remorph, and force their minds to focus long enough for the long flight home.  It’s only when Rachel is in owl morph, staring around the dimly lit alleyway, that she sees the security camera pointed directly at their location.  
  * <They must not check it that often,> Marco says without much hope.  <Or else they’d be out here already to come looking for us.>
  * <Doesn’t matter,> Tobias says harshly.  <It had a perfectly clear view of all your human faces.  And that building is owned by the yeerks.>
  * They all stare at each other in dull shock as the realization sinks in.  They always knew this moment was coming—they could only be so careful for so long—and yet, on some level each of them hoped it never would.  
  * <Take one more night to be with your families,> Jake says at last.  <We evacuate everyone in the morning.>
  * Jake loses his phone, again, somewhere amidst all the chaos.  This time around he doesn’t bother to replace it.  It’s not like his mom is going to be wondering where he is, not anymore.  



50.  _The Ultimate_

  * “So,” Jake says, “this is going to sound crazy, but—”
  * “Aliens are invading the planet, and you’re the only kid terrorist who can stop them?” James suggests.  “We do have wifi up here, you know.  You’re Jake Berenson, right?  You’re all over the conspiracy theorists’ forums right now.”
  * “Um.”  Jake runs a hand through his hair, starts again.  “Yeah, pretty much.”
  * James nods.  “In that case, you’ve got thirty seconds to convince me your story’s not a load of crap before I call security.”  



51.  _The Absolute_

  * Ax secures their wifi in something he describes as being a billion times better-hidden than TOR.  With that reassurance, they all end up starting blogs.
  * Marco’s is a rambling string of wry comments about everything from the invasion to his parents’ science projects.  Sample post: “Insider source (aka my mom): Visser Three has morphed human and eaten AN ENTIRE BAG OF MARSHMALLOWS in one sitting, ON MORE THAN ONE OCCASION.  Pass it on!”
  * Jake’s is the place that people go to find out how they can help, and to get his reassurance that the help means something.  Sample post: “As Barack Obama says, ‘We the people recognize that we have responsibilities as well as rights; that our destinies are bound together; that a freedom without a commitment to others is unworthy of our founding ideals, and those who died in their defense.’  This fight will never be over just as long as we keep supporting each other.  I can’t tell you how grateful I am to you all for the KickStarter donations.”
  * Rachel’s has beauty tips for the American girl on the run, light and self-deprecating enough that you often don’t notice the undercurrent of desperation.  Sample post: “If you want to be able to look at yourself in the mirror, try fixing your hair using reflective surfaces such as pots, ponds, or pieces of Bug fighter wreckage.  Alternately, just say ‘fuck it’ and never look at yourself again.”
  * Cassie’s tells people how to stay safe, and how to keep their environments safe as well.  Sample post: “Everyone please remember, it’s important to stock enough food and water for family pets as well as humans when retreating to an apocalypse bunker!”
  * Tobias’s has a lot of good-natured grumbling about everyday life in the valley.  Sample post: “In other news, my girlfriend’s mom is currently arguing with the smartest being on the face of the planet about where to put the new latrine facilities.  Sorry Naomi, but my money’s on Toby.”
  * Ax’s has a lot of food reviews, of course, but again there’s that undercurrent of desperation, almost like he’s trying to convince someone else (or maybe even himself) that humans are worth saving.  Sample post: “Marco assures me that there are no less than 23 distinct flavors contained within every sip of Dr. Pepper.  Just think of the years of experimentation and innovation it must have required to produce a drink which can inspire 23 different reactions from human taste buds, all at the same time.  Truly inspired genius.”



52.  _The Sacrifice_

  * They run drills upon drills for what to do in case of a drone strike.  Using any morphs they have that can dig or build—mole, taxxon, elephant, beaver—the Animorphs create an extensive network of tunnels and shelters, posting guards at all times to keep their eyes on the sky.  The hork-bajir valley doesn’t show up on satellite imagery, which they only know thanks to Peter’s definitely-illegal fact-gathering missions on the darkweb, but they don’t know for sure whether an overhead camera would be subject to the same strange perceptual distortions they all experience when flying there as birds.  
  * They nearly lose their precious secrecy when Naomi sends several emails from her work account, claiming she’s being held hostage and asking anyone who will listen to come rescue her.  Eva generates a hasty follow-up from the same account asking people to ignore “the prank that I now realize was in poor taste,” but none of them are sure it worked for the next several days.  



53.  _The Answer_

  * Rachel makes one last post on her nearly-extinct Instagram account.  This time the scrap of paper she uses appears to be torn from the back of a food label, but the penciled script is as intricate as ever.  It reads “Who wants to live forever? —Freddie Mercury, 1986”  



54.  _The Beginning_

  * After it’s all over, Tobias retreats, he hides, but he keeps a thread of communication open.  Cassie shoots him an email with the subject line “Hawk patient with intermittent aggression and lethargy—any idea what could be causing it?”  Marco sends him idiotic memes that now feature the Animorphs’ names and faces.  Ax asks for constant updates on the new wing of Taco Bell being built downtown, and repays the favor by leaking confidential information about the search for the Blade ship.
  * And then he gets one of the stranger emails he’s ever received.  It’s an offer of a full legacy scholarship to Harvard University (which has just found the means to explain some inconsistencies in the records of one “Alan Fangor,” who graduated in the ‘80s) in exchange for Tobias teaching one class per semester on any subject of his choice.  He agrees, with the stipulation that all his classes be online.
  * The resultant course (Ornithology 442: An Insider’s Perspective) is like nothing the students who participate have ever seen before.  Tobias will write out rambling treatises on Why Blue Jays Suck or All the Ways Hawks Are Superior to Eagles with a thought-speak-to-text recorder.  He’ll deliver online lectures from a shaky webcam pointed into a nonspecific tree, occasionally wandering off for hours at a time to go hunting.  Students who ask him personal questions about Rachel get regurgitated mouse skeletons Fed-Exed to their campus mailboxes.  Essays that don’t demonstrate much effort get feedback such as “even I can tell this sucks and I have a seventh-grade education” or “my grandmother could make better sentences than this AND SHE’S AN ANDALITE WHO DOESN’T SPEAK ENGLISH.”  Assignments include “find one bird fact in a textbook and explain why it’s a load of crap” or “go film a Boston pigeon until it does something interesting, I dare you.”
  * Nevertheless, enrollment is so popular that Harvard has a three-year waiting list and charges students an extra $500 just to sign up.  When Tobias finds out about the extra fee, he promptly video-calls the  _Intrepid_ , gives Ax remote access to his computer, and explains why he needs Ax to convert the course illegally to a MOOC.  Harvard University fires him for breach of contract; Yale hires him on that very same afternoon.  



**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Original posts [ here](http://thejakeformerlyknownasprince.tumblr.com/post/158975737479/modern-animorphs-au-part-1) and [ here](http://thejakeformerlyknownasprince.tumblr.com/post/159648355489/modern-animorphs-au-part-2).  
> The inspiration for Tobias taking out drones came from [ this news story](http://thejakeformerlyknownasprince.tumblr.com/post/152771213109/obviously-im-all-for-this-i-am-all-for-birds).  
> [The River of Truth speech](https://am23.akamaized.net/tms/cnt/uploads/2016/05/3779149-no-you-move-cap-says.jpg)  
> [MOOCs](http://mooc.org/)


	11. What if they were telepathic throughout the series?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An anon asked: What if the animorphs kept the telepathy ability that was in the first book?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Since there are a couple abilities that kinda come up in the first book but not again—continuity is a tricky beast—I went with the ability that Elfangor demonstrates to send everything from emotions to images to huge downloads of information using thought-speak.
> 
> Additional warnings for canon-typical levels of violence and gore.

  * All five of them are still staring up at the sky, watching the yeerk ship come in to land, when the andalite suddenly whips his tail around.  Tobias flinches back, but Elfangor just gently presses the flat of his tail blade against Tobias’s forehead.  Visser Three’s Blade ship is descending, Jake is calling for them all to get out of there, Elfangor is bleeding out on the cracked concrete, but the two of them stay frozen there for a long several seconds anyway.  Finally Tobias rocks back, taking a huge gasp of air as if just waking up.  Rachel yanks him away from Elfangor, out of sight behind a broken wall, before he has time to ask any of the billion questions on the tip of his tongue.
    * This time, when Elfangor sends them all a warm burst of courage and hope, Tobias closes his eyes—and sends it back.
  * Jake practically has to drag Tobias to safety even as Rachel distracts the hork-bajir-controllers.  Tobias is silent, strangely blank-faced despite the tears that continue to run down his cheeks, eyes flickering to follow events that have no relation at all to the present world.
    * When he finally does come to, Tobias finds himself in Jake’s bed in the middle of the night.  Jake is camped out on the floor, sitting up in his sleeping bag in a way that suggests he hasn’t even tried to lie down and sleep yet.
    * Unable to stand the fear and concern in Jake’s eyes, Tobias leans down and presses a hand against his shoulder.  “It’s okay,” he whispers, and lets the threads of his own excitement and wonder and fascination flow through that touch, keeping his grief and terror locked away.  “I’ll explain in the morning, but I promise we’re going to be okay.”
    * Sleepy as a child, Jake looks up at him and nods trustingly.  Together they slip into strange, cosmic dreams.
  * It takes Tobias several days to sort through the enormous set of memories that Elfangor forced into his mind.  When Cassie asks, he says it’s almost like a huge computer file that’s been compressed into a tiny amount of disk space, all there but time-consuming for his brain to read through.  Still, the more Tobias figures out the more he can teach the others: he makes Rachel laugh just by concentrating hard enough at the place where Marco’s hair is stuck to a hay bale behind him with static electricity, he shows Jake how to pull out of a dive during flight without ever saying a word, he coaches Cassie through spreading empathy to the rest of the team.
    * Marco remains the most reluctant to get involved, not even morphing after each of them have all tried it at least once.  No matter how many times the others reassure him that it’s cool, that being an animal is the wildest thing and sharing it with everyone else is even crazier, he keeps saying that they all need to stay the fuck out of his head if they know what’s good for them.  Because, he insists, he is  _not_  fighting this war.
    * “It’s okay,” Tobias says gently.  “In your situation I’d be that concerned about my dad as well.  In fact—”
    * Marco punches Tobias so hard that he actually knocks him over.  Tobias, dizzy and with a newly blackened eye, misses the next several seconds where Jake has to tackle Rachel to keep her from strangling Marco and Cassie ends up _forcing_ everyone to calm down.
  * After all that, it’s Marco who galvanizes them into the first battle.  Just one, he insists, one and done, but… He glances at Jake while Jake’s back is turned, and doesn’t finish that sentence.   _But this battle can’t go unfought_ , Tobias supplies mentally.
  * It’s Jake’s idea to gather them all into a huddle before that first battle.  Tobias is reluctant to demorph, but he does it anyway when he understands what Jake is doing.  The five of them link arms, forming a circle with their bodies as they all face each other across the dense space.  Marco mutters a comment about Satanic rituals that sets them all off giggling, but even he quiets down when Tobias becomes the first one to send them all emotion.
    * All of them take deep breaths, filled to the brim with Rachel’s fierce courage and thirst for vengeance.  With Jake’s casual, collected self-confidence.  Cassie’s sweet compassion and indomitable will.  Marco’s racing brilliance and bleak amusement.  Tobias’s determined, hopeful, iron-hard idealism.
    * Thus, armed to the teeth with one another’s strength and skill, they go into battle together.
  * After, of course, everything changes.  And yet in some ways nothing does.
    * Jake knows what happened—or at least some part of it—the moment he sits up in bed before Tobias has even had time to land on his windowsill.  With a shaking hand he presses resilience and hope into Tobias’s feathers.
    * Rachel comes by often, and together the two of them construct elaborate daydreams which range from the inane (What if unicorns were real?) to the exquisitely sad (What would they do together, if they could go on a normal date?) as they sit side by side in Tobias’s meadow.
    * Cassie and Jake and even Marco come by to visit on a rotating schedule, Marco transmitting ridiculous little mental cartoons of their Algebra teacher and speculating about what that yeerk in Chapman’s brain does all day, while Jake and Cassie mostly just send love and support.
    * “What’s wrong?” Rachel says, and Tobias sends her the sensation of hot wet meat and bone sliding down her throat even as the dying scream of a field mouse echoes in her ears.  She swallows hard, looking faintly sick, but all she says out loud is, “At least it’s more nutritious than hamburgers, right?”
  * When the dreams come, it takes Cassie and Tobias all of thirty seconds—and a fair amount of intense concentration—to convince the others that this is a real problem and that there’s an andalite who definitely needs their help.  Tobias only hears secondhand about when the others all discovered that whales can also use this strange form of nonverbal communication they all thought was unique to andalites.  However, he gets to meet Ax in person before long, so it’s largely a moot point.
    * «You have paid a high price for the gift of my brother Elfangor,» Ax says, in his strangely formal andalite way.
    * «Prince Elfangor was your brother?» Tobias demands.  «Wow.  Then I guess that’d make you my uncle.»
    * “Wait, WHAT?” three or four people say at the same time.
  * It’s the sort of thing that Tobias found too raw, too personal, to share with anyone else.  Almost every other detail from the huge set of memories he received has been parceled out to his friends, picked over and analyzed to death… Except this one, which Tobias has kept close.
    * That is, until he met someone who had known Elfangor far better than he ever would.  He and Ax spend most of the next several days talking—and doing that strange andalite thing which goes beyond mere speech—about everything Ax remembers of his brother.  About Elfangor’s legacy, and their struggle to live up to the gifts he left.
    * Tobias gives Ax the secondhand memories he received, and the story they tell: of a disgraced prince and two eager young arisths, of a pair of human children stranded far from their own world, of how yeerks came to take their only andalite host and thousands of humans after.  Neither of them quite knows what to make of it, but together they start to put together the disparate pieces of a life that ended too soon.
  * Before every battle they follow the same ritual, sharing—amplifying—their courage and determination while crushing their fear and exhaustion to death beneath the weight of their common affirmation that they’re all still here to fight another day.  Ax teaches them all on a level without words what it means to give oneself so fully to one’s team and one’s cause that one ascends a mere petty life to become part of a legend.  Jake thinks of the humbling realization of his friends’ love as Cassie and Marco charged to rescue his family on the shores of a night-dark lake.  Marco pulls up the fierce pride of causing his mother to laugh until she snorted unflatteringly, and marries it with the gorilla’s slow-burning anger at the yeerks who took her away.  Rachel gives them all the heady feeling of a perfectly executed cartwheel and the even headier rush of invincibility that comes every time they survive another battle.  Cassie thinks of the awe and beauty and near-terror she felt the first time a humpback whale gave her a tiny glimpse of the sheer scale of the ocean, and the awareness that this is what they are fighting for.  Tobias gives them the soaring freedom of coasting on silky wings through a perfect sky and the hork-bajir’s own fierce cry of defiant independence from yeerk tyranny.
    * After, they are quieter, more subdued.  The exhaustion that bleeds from every cell of their broken-repaired-mutilated-remade bodies cannot help but slide through their connection, but other things get through as well.  The knowledge that they’re all still here, if only for now.  The hope that maybe this time they made a difference.  Even just the warmth of the worry that Jake is going home to a controller-infested house and Marco is going home to an empty one, while Ax and Tobias aren’t quite going home at all, can be enough to keep them feeling safe for a time.
    * They don’t know it, but they are healthier than they would otherwise be.  More secure.  Better prepared for the horrors to come.
  * And come they do.
  * Tobias becomes a sieve rather than a vessel, letting every modicum of pain and fear flow  _through_  his body—and straight into Taylor.  She crumples to the ground, screaming, and he feels a vicious joy.  Two hours later when the Animorphs manage a rescue, Taylor is screaming “How are you  _doing_  that?” as Tobias watches her with calm defiance, barely a feather out of place.
  * Rachel jolts her reduced team with heady insouciance like a million shots of caffeine when she leads the team while Jake’s out of town.  High on her courage and elation, trapped in a feedback loop of their own cockiness, no one realizes that eight civilians have already died until it’s too late.
  * “There’s something I have to tell you,” Tobias says to Loren.  He presses a soft hand to her arm, concentrating carefully—and watches her entire expression transform in surprise.
  * It’s Ax who finds Jake in the hork-bajir valley after they fail to evacuate his family.  Ax who presses the flat of his tail blade against Jake’s forehead.  Ax who sends a message with associations and images and emotions and everything that there are not words to describe.  Ax who gives Jake his entire life in some ways, and in others gives only one concept:  _I understand_.  Ax who clumsily catches Jake when he collapses afterward, nearly sending them both to the ground, and holds him for the next hour as he cries.
  * «Where’s Rachel?» Marco says during their final battle for the Pool ship, and Jake cannot contain the emotion that comes spilling out of him in response.
    * Tobias shouts at him.  Cassie sends a wave of silent recrimination that nearly knocks him off his feet.  Ax stares at him with an expression, nearly pitying, that is worse than Cassie’s anger.  It’s Marco who finally takes a shaky breath and says, «In that case, we’d better get to the bridge and help her out, don’t you think?»
    * What happens in the interim—the cold calculation between Marco and Ax as Jake watches the yeerk pool flushed into space, the disgust as Cassie tells Erek he’s a robot who doesn’t even  _feel_  and wouldn’t understand, the desperation bleeding out of Tobias like a toxic cloud—doesn’t matter.  What matters is this: when they get to the bridge, Rachel’s fight hasn’t begun yet.  What matters as well: the Blade ship and the Pool ship are parked end-to-end, so close that it is possible to shout thought-speak, to send emotions, across the divide.
    * «Surrender.  Now,» Jake tells Visser One.  Espin senses the cold confidence in that voice to the depths of his being, and doesn’t bother to argue.
  * The ensuing fight on the bridge of the Blade ship is the stuff of legends.  One grizzly bear goes up against an entire menagerie, over twenty different predators and killers from this planet and half a dozen others.  One grizzly bear, and yet not fighting alone.  Every single one of the Animorphs is right there with her in spirit and in sense, looking through her eyes and feeling through her claws as the six of them together battle for her life.
    * Rachel has only weak near-sighted bear vision, and yet she swings around to monitor her flanks with an andalite warrior’s grace and ease, incorporating both her own view and that from the screen as if she has four eyes instead of two.  With discernment keener than her own she registers the second that the cape buffalo in front of her drops its shoulder to charge, ignoring the lioness to her left even as it turns from battle to run.  Two of the hyenas converge on her, and—picturing the ship’s layout as if from above—she ducks behind a control module just in time to send one crashing into the other with bone-breaking force.
    * Exhaustion has her swaying on her feet, but she digs deep inside herself finds the willpower to shove pain and fatigue aside even as her body fights on, more under her friends’ control than her own.  With cold calculation she slams a rhinoceros into the far windscreen hard enough to shatter a hole clear through the window of the Blade ship, watching as if from a distance as the entire craft tilts out of orbit and half a dozen controllers are sucked into the unforgiving vacuum of space.  It is with far more compassion that she steps over injured bodies without finishing them off, goes for disabling blows rather than killing ones—including with the king cobra she leaves coiled unconscious on the floor.
    * At the end of it she stands over the carnage, the only one left reasonably intact despite the bleeding cuts that coat her fur and the gory absence of her right eye.  Staggering, she presses her unbroken front paw against the computer’s control-system panel, blindly obeying the mental commands that Ax sends to her in order to bring the ship down.
    * It is only when Rachel is confirmed as safe that the other five Animorphs realize that this entire time their bodies have been lying almost unattended on the deck of the Pool ship, and that Alloran has been fighting with the strength and skill of twenty warriors to keep them all safe from the remaining controllers in their mental absence.
  * «We are not so different from you,» Jake tells the andalite high command.  Through their long-distance comm he sends his weariness of war and his hope for the future.  The sick sadness of his grief and the flickering flame of his defiance.  The love he holds for his planet in general and his friends—his family—in particular.  He sends all this, and he can see immediately that the andalite prince understands.
  * Meanwhile, a Blade ship is landing on the Washington Mall.  When the ramp descends Rachel staggers off it into the jarringly manicured lawn, dragging the unconscious body of her cousin, and only pauses long enough to flip off the shouting circle of reporters that surrounds her before she goes to find her friends.



**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Original post [ here.](http://thejakeformerlyknownasprince.tumblr.com/post/163535228039/what-if-the-animorphs-kept-the-telepathy-ability)


	12. What if they were caught during their first mission?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Anonymous said: What do you think would happen if the Animorphs were caught during their first mission?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Additional warnings for canon-typical violence, gore, torture, body horror, and major character death.

  * “You know that old joke,” Temrash 114 says, pacing up and down in front of them, “about how the babysitter keeps getting calls from some asshole who wants to kill her, and eventually she figures out that, all along, the calls were coming from  _inside the goddamn house_?”  Tom’s face twists, expression cold with anger.  “That’s what my life feels like right about now.”
    * “It wasn’t a  _joke_ , you dumbass,” Rachel mutters, “it was a horror story.”
    * Tom's shoulders lift in a shrug which is not casual enough to disguise Temrash's anger.  “Depends on your point of view, I guess.”
    * “Won’t you get in trouble, then?” Marco asks, expression still sharp despite the blood painting a line from his scalp to his chin.  “If Jake was here the whole time and you didn’t even know it?  Doesn’t that make you a raging moron?”
    * “Jury’s still out as to whether we should infest your dad,” Temrash 114 says calmly.  “I could just shoot him in the head, save Visser One a lot of trouble with her host.”
    * Marco clearly doesn’t know what Visser One has to do with anything, but he snaps his mouth shut all the same, face very white.
  * Jake tunes out everything they’re saying, because it’s not important.  What’s important—so important that he can’t even think around it—is that this is all his fault.  He can’t believe he was stupid enough, when Marco said that Tom was a controller, to insist on making sure.  To refuse to believe what he was hearing in the middle of that Sharing meeting, to have to get closer…
    * No one looks twice at a dog, he’d said.  Unless, of course, the someone was  _Tom_ , and the dog was  _Homer_.  Unless Jake was stupid enough to wander straight into the loose gathering of controllers on the edge of the beach in the hope that the words he was hearing from his brother’s mouth would somehow prove illusion up close.
    * Jake was the first one caught, but the roundup after that was brutally fast: they found Marco and Cassie because Tom knew to look for them, whereas Rachel had tried to morph and fight back and Tobias had dived from the sky in an effort to save her.  They’re all tied up for the moment while over a dozen controllers point various weapons at them and two people in the next room (the andalite-controller and a human whose voice sounds familiar for some reason Jake can’t place) shout at each other over what to do next.
    * Jake’s lying the closest to the door, a short ways away from the others—the yeerk inside Tom kicked him over there in disgust—so he can see as hork-bajir-controllers lead his parents, Rachel’s sisters, even Tobias’s uncle toward the stairs that lead down to the yeerk pool.  He’s vaguely aware that there are tears running down his face, but he tries his hardest to tune out everything except some possible way to get them all out of this.


  * Rachel is lying a few feet away from Jake, twisting constantly against the duct tape around her wrists.  The only morph she has so far is a horse from Cassie’s barn, but horses can kill people.  She could take a few of them down before they managed to catch her…
    * She feels a cool hand rest on her ankle, and discovers that Tobias is watching her through wide grey eyes.  He can speak volumes with a tiny shift of expression, wearing his emotions on his sleeve in a way that makes some part of her desperate to draw him close and protect him.  Right now it’s not hard to tell what he’s thinking: that he knows what she’s planning.
    * Glancing upward at Chapman—or more specifically at the dracon beam in Chapman’s hand—he shakes his head just a tiny bit.
    * Rachel jerks her ankle out from under his hand.  Wasn’t he the one who was going on yesterday about how they have to avenge the andalite who died for them?  
    * “We  _live_ ,” Tobias hisses, voice drowned out by the shouting in the next room and by Marco, who has started loudly asking questions about one of the voices they can all hear.  “We live and fight another day.  We’ll have another chance, okay?”
    * Gritting her teeth, Rachel nods.
  * It’s a decision they all live to regret.  Their bodies rapidly become hosts for high-ranking vissers and sub-vissers, their faces and their voices used in the most horrific possible way.
    * Essak 1275, who gets Jake’s body, acquires every Earth morph that catches his eye and a few dozen from other planets as well.  He gets reprimanded a couple of times, since it’s getting harder and harder to contain Jake during feedings (still not as difficult as Alloran, but no one tells Visser Three to stop), but the yeerk also gets results.  The complaints stop around the time he uses Jake to kill and eat over forty leerans while in the shape of a lerdethak.  
    * Marco stops walking—stops of his own accord—the first time they send Visser Twenty-Three into a meeting with Visser One.  Eva’s face does something strange and unquantifiable for several seconds before Edriss wrestles it back into harsh neutrality.  “Get ahold of yourself, won’t you?” she snaps.  Marco’s eyes close, and Akdor 1154 nods.  
    * Rachel screams death threats and other useless words as Visser Eight uses her face and voice to draw in their tenth victim this month.  Melissa Chapman, Brittany Grant, and T.T. Malcolm are controllers already.  Allison Valencia and Beth Hammond both attend Sharing meetings regularly, and they’re thinking of becoming full members.  Rachel’s the most popular girl in her entire class; it’s like taking candy from a baby.
    * To everyone’s surprise, it’s Cassie who gets the reputation for being the rebellious host.  Niss 240 aims a dracon beam at a suspicious-looking bird; Cassie jerks it to the side.  Niss starts in on a recruitment pitch; Cassie causes her to collapse on the floor.  There’s talk of simply killing Cassie, as reluctant as everyone is to give up on a morph-capable host (and an estreen at that), but the incidents stop happening after Cassie gets transferred to Aftran 942’s control.  In fact, Aftran herself seemingly falls off the face of the Earth for a while, because no one seems to know where she is or what she’s up to a lot of the time.
    * Tobias morphs, one time when Odret 177 is feeding and he’s temporarily unsupervised in the cage, and nothing the controllers do can get him to turn back.  He sits there calmly and watches as they fire dracon beams at him, as they throw hot acid on Rachel and Jake, as they threaten to kill his uncle and then carry out their threat.  As they drag an unfamiliar blond woman with a scarred face into his cage, and shoot her in the head as if expecting him to care.  They zap him with picana, with a low-level shredder blast, finally with a nervous system manipulator, but nothing works.  He screams, he fights back, he throws himself against the bars of their birdcage until he breaks his own wings, but he doesn’t demorph.  Two hours and fifteen minutes into the process, the controllers admit defeat: one of them pulls out a handgun.  Tobias dies free.  
  * Essak 1275 starts being sent on hunting expeditions.  He’s mostly close-mouthed about what he’s hunting, but all of the highest-ranked vissers know: there’s at least one andalite loose somewhere on Earth.  
    * Reports are conflicting as to whether it’s just one or if the one has support—some of the rumors that trickle in from Nikto 770’s scans of the human media indicate there might be as many as three—but they all know that unless this andalite’s getting help from the humans, there’s no way he’ll blend in for long.  The andalite or andalites, meanwhile, have already taken out a water supply ship and a ground-based kandrona supply.
    * One day Jake reaches through the bars separating the hosts’ cages and grabs Tom on the arm.  “Tell the others,” he says.  “There are andalites bandits here, and they’re fighting back.  Don’t give up.  Don’t ever give up.  Not while there’s still hope.”
    * Tom’s eyes widen.  “You mean…?”
    * “I mean the yeerks aren’t winning this war as cleanly as the vissers want everyone to think,” Jake says.  “Tell everyone you can: the andalites are out there.”
  * One day Aftran strides into the yeerk pool, Cassie’s chin held high, an unfamiliar young man walking by her side.  Slowly, almost casually, they make their way over to the specialized reinforced cages used to hold the morph-capable hosts.  Threatening to kill one Animorph if the other makes an escape attempt seems to work fairly well, so Jake and Rachel are currently chained up across from each other and guarded by four hork-bajir-controllers apiece.  Cassie’s hand drops to brush along each cage as she walks by, and as she touches first Jake and then Rachel two tiny red dots fall from her sleeve.  
  * Jake finds himself staring in amazement at the tiny ladybug that crawls slowly across the surface of his hand.  He doesn’t know about the hours Cassie and Aftran and Gafinilan spent experimenting in order to discover that ladybugs have the eyes and the wings to get around in a hurry, while also having all toxic creatures’ calm insouciance which renders them easy to carry around.  He doesn’t know that the bug on his hand traveled here inside Cassie’s mouth to defeat the Gleet Biofilters, or that this is the final execution of a plan which was months in the making.
    * He does, however, know what to do.  Concentrating hard on the feel of six tiny feet even now resting on the curve of his index finger, he feels the little beetle sag into relaxation.  Across the way, a minuscule point of red falls from Rachel’s arm as she finishes acquiring her own set of DNA.
    * <Please be calm,> an unfamiliar voice says inside their heads.  <My name is Aximili, and I am here to help.  Prince Cassie is about to set off a diversion.  When she does, we need both of you to morph as quickly as possible and move toward the northwest exit of the yeerk pool.>
    * Rachel lifts her head up, shorn hair sliding away from her face, and actually grins at Jake.  “Let’s do it.”
  * The diversion, when it comes, is brutally simple: Aximili starts the sequence that will drain the yeerk pool for cleaning.
    * Every controller in the vicinity immediately rushes to try and stop him, including the ones guarding Rachel and Jake.  They both morph fast and morph small, shrinking out of their restraints as they become hard-shelled and six-legged.  Jake takes off for the spot where Cassie is rushing the cages, tiny wings beating hard against the stale kandrona-polluted air, but Rachel goes in a different direction entirely.
    * Jake and the others might be focused on trying to grab a handful of the hosts and run for it, but Rachel’s here for revenge.  She buzzes over the heads of two human-controller guards who never even look up, slots through a tiny crack in the door of the holding cell on the far side of the yeerk pool, and trundles through a crevasse in the two-foot-thick cinderblock walls of the holding chamber.  This is where Visser Three’s loyal sycophants hold any monster whose DNA he’s planning on acquiring—and right now the chamber is full.
    * When she demorphs on the floor, she finds herself face-to-face with an octopus-like creature.  If an octopus had a hard exoskeleton and several rows of sharp teeth, that is.  If an octopus was fifteen feet tall and had claws on the ends of its tentacles.  If an octopus had a gaping jaw and more clumsy limbs than it knows what to do with.
    * “Hello, gorgeous,” Rachel whispers, and the creature attacks.
    * She throws herself out of the way of its stabbing claws, dodges a snaking tentacle, and finally flings herself on top of one of its limbs.  The creature immediately grabs her, but that’s exactly what she wanted; she presses her skin against its lumpy body (and has to grit her teeth—this thing feels like it’s made of acid) and the creature goes limp, dropping her to the ground.
    * Rachel jams herself into a far corner focuses on her brand-new set of DNA, ignoring the creature ( _rancor_ , her inner  _Star Wars_ geek decides to call it) as it continues to do its best to eat this strange invader to its territory.  As she swells and hardens, she finds herself gasping in pain—the poor rancor is  _not_  adapted to Earth’s atmosphere—but doesn’t let that deter her.  The real rancor makes another attempt to grab her and rip her in half, so she reaches out and, with a single delicate tentacle, enters the code on the keypad next to the door that will let them both into the hallway.
  * Cassie finds herself frozen in shock for several seconds as two aliens—each one the size of a semi-trailer—burst out of a side hallway and immediately start tearing apart every controller within twenty yards.  <How do you like me now?> one of them shouts in a very familiar voice, and laughingly tears the roof clear off an enclosure holding a dozen hork-bajir hosts.
    * The hork-bajir explode outward in every direction, most of them running for the nearest exit, but several stop and begin slashing at controllers.  One male hork-bajir who can’t be more than two years old takes a dracon shot to center mass and goes down, weakly crying out in pain; four adults jump on his attacker and begin tearing the man to shreds.  Tom and Melissa Chapman are standing back-to-back, firing at anyone who gets too close as they guard the base of a staircase where hundreds of humans and hork-bajir are streaming toward freedom.
    * Jake, now in some kind of simian-reptilian morph, has broken into a weapons depot and is throwing dracon beams to newly-freed hosts left and right; every minute, the number of deadly beams lancing through the air increases exponentially.  <Don’t shoot at anyone who doesn’t shoot at you first!> he keeps saying, but not everyone is listening.  Friendly fire is everywhere.
    * Aximili is out of morph and badly hurt, hooves sliding in the growing pool of his own blood as he uses his tail to fend off two hork-bajir-controllers even as both hands continue to fly across the controls of the yeerk pool maintenance computer.   A hork-bajir female Cassie doesn’t recognize is going from cage to cage and releasing ever-more hosts, while a taxxon-controller has set off some kind of alarm that is bringing hundreds of controllers running from every direction to join in the fray.  Rachel is grabbing double handfuls of human-controllers and flinging them across the room to land in wet heaps; even as Cassie watches she calmly lifts a taxxon and stuffs it into her mouth as it writhes and screams and pain.
    * Meanwhile, the water level on the yeerk pool is slowly but steadily dropping.
    * Cassie hears a soft moan of pain and anguish come from the back of her own throat.  She’s not sure if she or Aftran is the one making the noise.
  * And that’s when Visser Three bursts into the cavern, followed closely by Visser Twenty-Three in Marco’s body.  <We got two more morphers!> Jake shouts.
    * Visser Three takes in the scene all around him, says several very bad words, and then turns two eyes toward his lieutenant.  <Kill them!> he orders.  <Visser Twenty-Three, kill them all!>
    * Marco’s head cocks to the side in thoughtful consideration.  His hand goes to the dracon beam at his side, and lifts it just far enough to fire a single shot on full power that takes Visser Three’s head off at the shoulders.  “Oh, did I forget to mention?” he says, grinning.  “Visser Twenty-Three’s been dead for almost a week now.  The Peace Movement says hi, by the way.”
    * Cassie considers the possibility that in freeing him she created a monster.  Aftran privately agrees.  
  * <ANYONE WHO’S NOT A CONTROLLER,> Jake bellows in a voice worthy of Visser Three.  <STOP FIGHTING.  LET’S BLOW THIS POPSICLE STAND!>
    * Rachel rips a drop shaft clear off the wall, creating a huge opening into the incline beyond.  She flings the broken tunnel at a group of taxxon-controllers, laughing when four of them burst open on impact and the others go into a feeding frenzy.  Humans, hork-bajir, and the occasional taxxon or gedd are fleeing in every direction now, leaving the Animorphs’ own force dramatically reduced.
    * Even as she watches, the real rancor grabs a man running for the exit and eats him alive.  The beast has gotten in among the hosts now, and—enraged as it is from the constant pain of Earth’s excessive gravity and insufficient nitrogen—it’s killing indiscriminately.  <Sorry,> Rachel says vaguely, and then she wraps one of her own tentacles around the rancor’s neck.  The ensuing battle is nasty but brief, and at the end of it Rachel’s the only monster left in the cavern.  
    * Three hundred, four hundred, maybe more hosts have already made it outside.  Marco has morphed gorilla, and he’s swinging between cages ripping the locks off the few dozen full ones that remain.  So far Jake, Cassie, and the handful of hosts assisting them are holding the line, but with every second that goes by the proportion of controllers to non-controllers shifts in favor of the yeerks.
  * <Let’s go!> Jake calls, collapsing the line steadily backward.  There are still hundreds of freed hosts loose in the cavern, still hundreds in the cages, but there’s nothing else to be done to save them.  He and Cassie and the others are retreating shoulder-to-shoulder, hosts dropping steadily under dracon fire but being replaced all the while by more volunteers from behind them.
    * Marco lopes over and joins their outer shield, bellowing a challenge all around.  The andalite kid who managed to drain almost half of the yeerk pool stumbles over as well, tail flashing out at opponents with blinding speed.  Rachel is still halfway across the cavern, but she seems fine, and it’s not like anyone is daring to get close to her.
    * Jake is ten feet from the stairs, then five feet, closing the bubble all the while, when someone breaks from the line of hosts and sets off running in the wrong direction.  <Get back here!> Jake shouts.  <Now!>
    * Tom actually takes the time to pause and flip Jake off, and then turns and keeps running.  He disappears from sight amid the fracas.
    * Jake feels like someone ripped several feet of intestine out of his stomach, but he cannot linger on it.  <Cassie, get to the surface and start doing crowd control,> he says.  <Ax—mind if I call you Ax?—give her cover.  Rachel, get over here!  Everyone else, up the stairs now.  Marco and I will cover your retreat.>
  * Several more people run past the line, heading toward the stairs.  Jake doesn’t know if they’re controllers or not, and he can’t bring himself to care at the moment, too concerned with making sure that the yeerks don’t break through to the hosts behind him.  He moves steadily backward until one of his feet hits the bottom-most stair, and then he starts to demorph.  It’s just him and Marco now against about forty taxxon-controllers, both of them bleeding heavily.  There’s no sign of Rachel, or of Tom.  Marco slips; Jake yanks him to his feet.  Jake doesn’t even register the  _whamwhamwham_  of gunfire until he looks down and discovers a red hole just above his left hip.  He drags himself up another stair, clinging tight to the railing.  He’s not even fighting back anymore.  Now he’s just a human shield for the hosts behind.
    * And then an enormous grey-brown tentacle sweeps away almost twenty controllers in one go.  Rachel simply flings herself forward onto the enemy line, crushing people with her bulk.  She’s missing three limbs, dragging herself on the other five, but she’s still moving.
    * Tom bursts through the hole in the line she created, carrying a human shape over his shoulder and dragging what looks like a child by the wrist.  He shouts something at Rachel, who starts to demorph, still crawling toward the stairs.
    * Jake makes it outside—with his team more or less intact, no less—even if Marco is mostly carrying him for the last several yards.  He morphs amidst a crowd of hosts who are milling around outside of the shopping mall as if looking for direction, demorphs again as the entire herd starts a mass exodus toward the government buildings at the center of town.
    * They make a very strange picture, this enormous procession of newly-freed slaves marching through the center of town.  Many of them are bruised or bloodied.  Almost all of them are dull-eyed with shock.  They form an unbroken column that stretches nearly two miles in length, this collection of a few thousand humans and hork-bajir and other aliens.  Whatever else happens, this is too big for the yeerks to cover up.  There are too many of them for the yeerks to recapture them all.  The whole block tower is about to come toppling down.
  * It’s as they’re standing outside while Cassie and Aftran and Ax storm the mayor’s office with news of the invasion that Jake catches Tom again.  “What the hell were you thinking, going back like that?” he demands.  “If you’d been killed—if you’d been taken again—”
    * In response, Tom lowers the woman he’s still carrying to the floor.  Jake registers in shock that it’s their mother, currently unconscious.  “I couldn’t just leave her,” Tom snaps.
    * “Yeah, and what if she’s still a controller, huh?” Jake says.
    * “Get off his case,” Rachel tells him.  She’s holding onto the kid that Tom grabbed as well—it’s Sarah.  In this case there’s no question about whether Sarah’s still a controller, given the bruising grip Rachel has on her wrist and the fact that Sarah’s fingernails have already left bloody scratches all over both her sister’s hands.
    * “Three days from now it’ll be a moot point.”  Tom stands up, crossing his arms.  “Are you seriously going to tell me I should have left her there?  What, are you in charge here or something?”
    * “Of course he’s in charge,” Rachel says, as if this is something everyone agreed upon in a committee.  “That doesn’t mean he’s perfect all the time.”
    * “Wait, what?”  Jake’s pretty sure he missed something.
    * Ax takes that opportunity to stick his head out the door and say, <Prince Jake, the human mayor and Prince Cassie are ready for you now.  They’d like you to make a statement.>
    * “All right, fearless leader, guess you’re needed inside.”  Marco slaps Jake playfully on the arm.
    * Jake turns to Tom as a last resort.  “Please tell them I’m not in charge of anything,” he says.
    * Tom frowns, thinking it over.  “You did pretty good back there, midget.  I think I’d be ready to follow you through hell and back with only moderate levels of insubordination.”
    * Jake slowly turns in a circle, registering just how many people are looking at him.  Realizing that he’s ragged and barefoot and filthy with dried taxxon guts, but that everyone from the mayor to Cassie to the huge battle-scarred andalite standing over her shoulder is looking at him expectantly.
    * “If I’m leading this revolution,” he says at last, “Rule number one: nobody’s calling me ‘prince.’”
    * <Absolutely, Prince Jake,> Ax says, utterly solemn.



**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Rebloggable post [ here](http://thejakeformerlyknownasprince.tumblr.com/post/162204033649/what-do-you-think-would-happen-if-the-animorphs).


	13. What if they were college aged?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [ Magdalyna ](http://magdalyna.tumblr.com/)said: ...You went off with the humans being 33 instead of 13, but what if they were 23 instead?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Additional warnings for implied irresponsible use of pharmaceuticals and implied character death.

It’s funny how different 23 is for some people than others.  How at 23 some people are adults, some are adolescents, and some are still children.  How some 23-year-olds are like Marco: they work two jobs, keep up with night classes while taking 12 credits at the local college, and still find the time to be the primary caretaker for an ailing father.  Some are like Jake: they live at home with their parents, play 60 hours of video games a week, and awkwardly dodge questions about when exactly they’re going to start applying for jobs.  Some are like Tobias: already married with kids, already headed for divorce, already adroit at ignoring the scent of unfamiliar cologne on Melissa’s skin or the hundreds of dollars that disappear from the bank account every month.  

Some are like Cassie: youthful and bright-eyed and drinking in knowledge, children at heart who never want to leave the safe haven of university to enter the real world.  Some are like Rachel: they move from interning to working full-time in a matter of months, always striving forward with one eye fixed on that corner office, hungry for excitement and recognition.  Some are like Ax: they get handed too much responsibility too soon and wallow there, unable to find the courage to lead, wondering all the while,  _what would my brother do?_

 Anyway, it’s a funny age.

  * They go home, all of them, after they meet Elfangor.  Only this time when Tobias shows up at Jake’s house the next day, Jake looks him in the eye and says, “Sounds like a weird dream to me, but nah, I don’t remember any of that happening.”  Marco, standing over his shoulder, makes a dull noise of agreement.  After that, Tobias doesn’t dare ask any of the others for help.  
    * Cassie presses her hand to the warm flank of a skittish horse, two weeks later, and almost startles herself with how quickly he calms.  She continues to rest her hand there for a minute, wondering if she dares… And then her father calls from the house to invite her in for Sunday dinner, and the moment is forgotten.  (At least she tells herself she’s forgotten all about it.)
    * Tobias disappears a month after that.  Rachel smothers Melissa with blankets on the sagging couch of her studio apartment, cracks a bottle of merlot, and listens to her friend cry for the next three hours.  All the while she tries as hard as she can not to hope she’ll find a cat at her door, a bird tapping on her window, a fly on her windowsill, or another sign that Tobias can still trust her if not anyone else.  
    * Marco gets halfway through typing an online search inquiry: “alien + parasite + slug + brain - scifi” before he erases the whole chain without hitting  _search_.  He deletes his browsing history as well, reroutes the keystroke tracking software from his computer, and uninstalls the internet browser.  He wipes sweat off his forehead, trying not to glance around at anyone else sitting in the internet cafe with him, and then he walks out the door.  
  * The Dome ship’s life support systems, never built to handle three months’ worth of corroding salt water and relentless ocean pressure, fail.  The only andalite left inside, whose warriors and arisths and parents and brother are all dead, watches the world collapse around him and makes no attempt to morph.  
  * Six months after Melissa has arranged a cursory empty-casket funeral for Tobias, Marco sees a woman through a crowd and sets off running before he even registers why he knows her face so well.  He chases her for over four blocks, loses her down a dead-end alleyway, and tries to tell himself after that he imagined the whole thing.  He knows a friend of a friend who takes only cash to make the hallucinations and nightmares stop, and the tablets work so well that even Peter notices long enough to be concerned.  
  * Cassie morphs, exactly once, and even then only halfway.  Afterward, she dials Rachel’s number with shaking fingers, and dials it again, and dials it again.  By the time she finally has the right digits in the right order, she has already talked herself out of saying anything.
    * Rachel, meanwhile, sleeps with her window propped open every night.
    * <Don’t morph,> Tobias tells her, <It’s not worth it,> and she listens.
  * One year to the day after that night in the construction site, Jake leans against the railing of his back porch, afternoon sun golden-hot on his skin, a sweating beer loosely clasped in one long-fingered hand.  Tom is there as well, his own beer neglected on top of the railing’s corner post, and they haven’t talked in what feels like ages.
    * Which is why Jake says, apropos of nothing, “Do you believe in aliens?”  He gets no answer (and, still looking toward the yard, doesn’t see the way his brother’s expression has gone hard and narrow) so he continues.  “Like, do you ever wonder if there’s any way they’re already here on Earth?  I mean, maybe if they had some way to look like us, or, I don’t know, hide inside our minds.  That’s crazy, right?  That’d be impossible?”
    * He gets halfway through turning around for affirmation when there’s a sharp pain on the back of his head.  There’s enough time for him to register that it was a bottle that impacted his skull, and then his eyes are closing of their own volition for the very last time.
  * This is how it ends, this is how it ends: not with a bang, but with a phone call.
    * “Marco!  Hey, man, do you want to meet up for drinks after work today?  There’s a new place downtown I was thinking we could check out.”
    * “Cassie.  I know we haven’t talked in a while, not since… Well, you know.  Anyway, I’ve been feeling pretty down, and I was hoping we could meet up and talk this weekend  Maybe at that park the Sharing's rebuilding, yeah?”
    * “Hey, Rach, Dad’s been bugging me to invite you to join us for dinner, it being Shabbat and all.  You’re still my favorite cousin, so you should come on by later.”
    * Check and mate.
  * Eight years later, the last free human on the face of the Earth is half-bird, half-andalite, half-extinct.  He has battle scars, a timex watch, and friends among the few hork-bajir lucky enough to be hosts for rebel yeerks.  Tobias lives to see the end of his species, just as Dak Hamee lived to see the end of his.  The humans don’t have a concept of seers, at least not any more, but Ket Halpak calls him one anyway.  Tobias always ducks his head shyly when she says this, pretending to preen feathers so he won’t have to meet her eyes.  There’s usually a pause in the conversation, and then they carry on: he tells her of Sharpies and  _Speed Racer_ , she tells him of Mother Sky and kaftids.  Just for a little while they keep their cultures alive, if only in the stories they tell.



**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Original post [ here](http://thejakeformerlyknownasprince.tumblr.com/post/157033507224/just-found-the-age-ask-you-went-off-with-the).


	14. What if Marco was Deaf?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An anon asked: I don't know if you're still doing the aus thing, but what would have happened if one or all the animorphs had some kind of disability that doesn't heal with morphing so ax has to get over his ableism since the beginning?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Additional warnings this chapter for ableism, implied child neglect, and anti-deaf stigma.

  * <I know,> Elfangor says inside their minds, and Marco jerks around in surprise, one hand coming up to the side of his head.
    * _What the fuck?_  he signs to Jake.   _How the fuck…?_
    * Jake frowns.   _Aliens?_  he answers at last, and adds a shrug.
    * Marco laughs, surprising the others.
  * In fact, Rachel finds herself surprised by a lot of aspects of Marco over the next several days.  It turns out he’s  _snarky_ , and not just snarky but funny as hell while he’s at it.  It never even occurred to her that she could be in the same class as a kid since the first grade and yet know so little about him by simple virtue of them having no languages in common.  Sure, Jake will translate for him sometimes, as will the professional interpreter the school pays to help him with classes, but it’s not until he gains the ability to thought-speak that she realizes he never shuts up.
    * In the eyes of half their school he’s just that sad, silent kid who lost his mom, excluded from most of their conversations so casually and so completely that she never knew until she thought to look about the constant running stream of sarcastic comments he keeps up where only Jake can understand.  She never knew about his tendency to babble when nervous, never knew about his weird and inappropriate sense of humor, never knew about his crazy skill with math and gaming.  Never knew him, period.  She prides herself on not judging based on appearances, but it appears she has all along.
    * When she starts learning ASL—when they all start learning, simply because they all spend so much time together—there are other revelations as well.  For instance, Marco has nicknames for them all: hers is the sign for television’s Xena, Tobias’s is the motion for “bird” nearer the forehead where one would normally indicate “boy,” Cassie’s is one she can only describe as “crazy tree,” and Jake’s is just the letter J twice held at an angle to indicate that he is ridiculously large.  He invents their term for yeerk—a hand held in the shape of a y with a finger wiggle to indicate antennae or fins—and taps it against his right temple to mean  _controller_.  Rachel doesn’t understand the motion he keeps making which looks almost like  _have-animal-warp_  until he finger-spells out A-N-I-M-O-R-P-H and makes a sweeping gesture at the five of them sitting around Cassie’s barn.
  * Osprey eyes are hands-down the coolest thing Marco has ever experienced.  Sure, the ears are interesting too, since apparently they can hear even more than most humans are able to perceive.  Although, to be honest, he finds the sounds somewhere between distracting and startling much of the time, especially before he gets the hang of flying while also being assailed by tree rustles and highway rumbles and bird calls.  The  _eyes_ , though.  He can literally read the lips of a person standing an entire mile away.  He can tell  _everything_  that’s happening around him with a single glance.  He can make out individual words written on signs and ads and ATMs while he coasts so far above them that he can also see half their town all at once.  With these eyes he could probably drive a car and carry on a conversation and read a book all at the same time, assuming that this morph actually had hands to talk with.  Seeing as a bird isn’t nearly enough to make the fear and death and blood and general awfulness okay, but it does go a long way toward making up for all the bad.
  * Marco doesn’t let any of the others into his apartment, even though they’ll use Rachel’s and Cassie’s and even Jake’s place fairly regularly.  Jake already knows about how Marco’s dad sits there, unmoving, eyes so unfocused he cannot possibly be reading the closed captions on the television that constantly plays in the living room, but Marco hopes to keep the others from finding out.  Honestly Marco has no idea what Peter does all day; the books in the apartment always have the same layer of dust when Marco cleans, the computer’s always left open to whatever IM chat he was last using with Jake, and the disability checks sort of keep them afloat so that Peter doesn’t have to work.
    * Later, Marco will marvel at the sick brilliance of it all.  The yeerks didn’t want to bother using Peter as a host, not when their eugenics-nazi-ableist bullshit prevents them from seeing him as useful.  Instead they took Peter’s primary link to the hearing world, and enslaved her, and warped her, and finally killed her.
    * For now, he steps between his father and the television as soon as he gets home.  He asks:  _you eat?_  the way he always does.  Peter’s eyes slide away, slide shut.  Marco wants to puke-scream-cry every time his father does this: shutting him out, turning him off, making him nothing.
  * It’s shameful to admit, but Jake seriously considers leaving Aximili at the bottom of the ocean for a good couple of seconds there.  It seems to take for-freaking-ever for the four of them to explain to the new kid that humans usually talk by sound, that Marco doesn’t perceive sound, that there’s a second language with gestures which Rachel and Cassie are still learning and they’ll be happy to teach Aximili, that Marco can understand and use thought-speak just fine but understanding and using sound-speak requires some guesswork on his part, that the condescending way Aximili describes ASL as “wonderfully clever” is Not Okay, that Marco took about two milliseconds to switch from fingerspelling A-X-I-M-I-L-I to making the short chopping motion for “axe” not because he’s confused about Aximili’s name but because he’s saving time and nicknaming people is a thing he does, that they’re willing to respect Aximili’s culture only up to a point and if he ever uses the word vecol again then Cassie will probably punch him even before Marco does, that they have no intention of keeping Marco in isolation and also no interest in ever hearing that suggestion ever again…
    * _We need smurf-kid?_  Rachel asks the others, echoing Jake’s thoughts.
    * Marco smirks at the moniker, and then shows her how to switch from  _smurf-kid_  to the sign that approximates  _eyes-on-horns_ , which is what he and Jake have been using to mean  _andalite_.  And then he turns to Jake, with a request for translation.
    * “We are, all of us, not ideal,” Jake says slowly, working off Marco’s hands but glancing at the andalite kid every so often for confirmation.  “We are children, we are not familiar—”  He stops when Marco shakes his head and repeats the motion, mouthing the word this time along with the sign.  “We are not  _experienced_ ,” Jake says.  “Not with battle, not with aliens, not with…”  He hesitates, and then, “Not with knowing what is right and what is wrong to do.”  Marco shrugs—that wasn’t precisely it—but after a second he nods to tell Jake that he’s close enough.  “We are the only people who can fight the yeerks.  We are not andalites, but we are willing.  I am willing to help, willing to fight, willing to die.  That would be—No, that  _should_  be,” Jake corrects, “enough.”
    * Marco stops talking, makes another small motion with no direct sign.  Jake can read his expression enough to know what he means: that he gave it his best shot, and now they’ll see.
    * Aximili considers this for several seconds.  <You fight the yeerks?> he says.  Marco tilts a fist, but then switches to nodding instead.  <You are willing to die to ensure that every being in this galaxy can live free from enslavement?> Aximili asks.  Again, Marco nods.  <You wish to protect this planet and avenge Elfangor?>  Another nod.
    * Jake shifts in place, wondering whether they’re going to be here all night—or at least however long it takes for the yeerks to find them—when Aximili finally steps forward, lowering his tail blade.  <Very well,> he says.  <I would be honored to fight and die by your side, until such time as rescue comes for us all.>
  * On their way home after leaving the newly-dubbed Ax in Tobias’s care, Marco says to Jake:  _Ax speaks… extra sounds on every word?_
    * _Extra sounds,_  Jake confirms, sighing.   _Every word.  Very distracting._
    * _Not a bother to me,_ Marco says smugly.  He’s lying, of course, because the wacky way that boy talks makes reading his lips a friggin’ nightmare, but he does it just to get Jake to roll his eyes and smile.
  * The first time Marco hears his mother’s voice, he’s thirteen years old.  The first time he hears it only through weak gorilla ears and yet wants to close his entire being around the memory of that sound.  The first time he hears it, it’s shaping commands and orders that Eva would never give, because the first time he hears it, he’s already too late for it to be her voice anymore: Visser One is choosing the words that her lips and tongue and throat all form.  The first time he hears her voice, a hatred so cold and so all-consuming fills him that he will never be able to hear her voice again (not even when Eva is once again the one speaking her own words) without some echo of that feeling twisting just below his heart.
  * <This is music?   _Seriously_ , Jake?  THIS is what everyone keeps talking about all the time?  This is atrocious.  I want my goddamn money back.>
    * <We  _didn’t pay_ , remember?  We snuck in.  After you were the one who was like ‘let’s morph dogs, Jake, just this once.  It could be the fate of the world, Jake.  I’ve never heard music before, Jake. It’s just one concert, Jake, and it might be the only concert I ever get to hear.  We could die at any minute, Jake.’>
    * <Don’t quote me to me, you screech-loving loser.>
    * <It’s not screeching, it’s The Offspring—>
    * <Yeah, well, right now  _The Offspring_ are screeching enough to offend me to the depths of my tiny doggy soul.>
    * <You know, if you pay attention to the lyrics, they’re actually pretty cool.>
    * <Nah, man.  If you like the lyrics so much, then just  _read the lyrics_.  Don’t pay somebody to scream them at you. >
    * <There’s also guitar, and percussion, and backup singing…>
    * <Uh-huh.  Enjoy your bloodcurdling warbles, dude.  I’m off to go find cute concertgoers to pet me and feed me popcorn some more.>
  * It’s ridiculous for Marco to feel like some part of his very self is under threat when he spends a few hours a week, every week, hearing.  It’s ridiculous that he’s never quite comfortable with the way that Tobias and Ax “talk” with something really more like verbal speech than ASL or text.  They all change.  They all become different things.  Marco’s been a wolf, a housefly, a dog, a gorilla, and a dolphin, for Pete’s sake.  That doesn’t mean he is secretly an animal deep down.
    * And it doesn’t mean he’s betraying his own culture by using a tool that—among other things—usually comes with sound perception.  It  _doesn’t_.  Honestly.  He’s such a melodramatic brat sometimes that he annoys even himself.
  * While running from the veleek, Marco and Jake work out a hasty set of signals—Jake taps Marco’s elbow to mean he has to go slower to let the death monster keep up, and his shoulder to mean he should go faster or they’re all gonna die—and Marco pretty successfully ignores everything but those two taps.  There is a  _lot_  of other gesticulation from the passenger seat, and from the few glimpses he catches out of his peripheral vision there’s a fair amount of yelling too, but he’s only got the two eyes and needs to point them both at the road.  Besides, it’s only three trash cans.  Okay, five.  Okay, maybe more like fifteen.  But trash cans are replaceable, right?
  * Later, Jake will be able to point to the day, the hour, the minute, the  _second_  he knew it wasn’t going to work with David.  It was less than ten minutes into their explanation of Animorphs and yeerks.  Marco tapped David on the shoulder to ask him to repeat himself where Marco could see his lips—and David, very deliberately turning his face away toward the rest of the room, said “Oh my god, is he always like this?”
  * <…so then this girl goes, ‘do you like opera?’  And I’m seriously staring at her for like six and a half seconds, wondering how I managed to misread her lips into the word  _opera_ … But then she repeats herself!>  Marco has been ranting for what feels to Tobias like half an hour now.  <And sure enough, she said opera.   _Opera_.  As in three freaking hours’ worth of— >
    * <Marco,> Tobias says patiently, <Remember the part where we’re supposed to be on surveillance duty, here?>
    * <Yeah, yeah, watching this lady like a hawk.  Which I am.  And she has some opera name…>
    * <Aria.>
    * <Exactly!>  He wheels around to get a better angle on the hotel room where she’s shut herself in the bathroom, yet again.  <And this girl’s name was Marian.  And this is her idea of a first date: three hours of sitting in a room where it’s too dark to have a conversation, squinting at people on a stage off in, like,  _New Zealand_  to try and follow a plot that’s going to be incomprehensible no matter what I do, because they’re not talking, they’re singing it!>
    * <So my maybe-cousin’s maybe-fake name was what got you on this track.  Good to know.>
    * <Anyway, just in case she’s called Aria because she’s some kind of opera freak, I’m telling you now man: don’t let her talk you into going.  Opera.  It’s a trap.>
    * <Hang on…>  Tobias tilts a wing so that he can wheel around and look directly at Marco.  <You actually  _went_  on this date?>
    * <A  _girl_  asked  _me_  out.  Not the other way around.  What was I supposed to do, refuse?>
    * <Uh, how about suggesting something other than opera for the first date?>
    * <Yeah, yeah, like you’re so smart.   _Now_  he tells me this.  Anyway, the moment was way too high-pressure for me to think of that kind of response, and the night of… Well, it was a good nap at least.  Even if I did apparently snore during some of it.>
    * Tobias can only imagine.  <You can rest easy, man.  I am most definitely not going on any dates with my cousin, and I’m also probably not going to be doing three hours’ worth of anything human at any point in the near future,> he drawls.  <If she even is my cousin,> he can’t resist adding.  <If my dad’s brother even had a daughter.  If my dad even had a brother.  If my dad’s even dead and not—>
    * <Hey, it’s Ax!> Marco says, apparently too self-focused to listen to Tobias’s whining.  <Or the world’s most lost harrier.  Wait here, I have to go tell him that if a girl asks him to the opera then he has to run for his life.>
  * Visser One knows they are human.  She already knows, and she is about to die, and Marco is in gorilla shape.  Which is why he does it: he lifts his right hand, palm out, middle and ring fingers folded down, other three fingers extended.  Marco sees her eyes widen in shock, her lips start to form around his name, and then she falls.  She screams, and he screams along with her.
  * <I’m telling you,> Marco explains to the others, <there’s no point in messing around with trying to get the roach’s vibratey-feeling to make sense as words.  If we’re eavesdropping, we’re mostly going to be better off just reading lips.>  Which turns out to be easier said than done, Rachel is quickly discovering.  Sure, she excels at Marco’s training technique of turning off her television’s sound and deciphering the actors without closed captions, but in practice it proves to be a lot more hazardous.
    * <But what do I do if a controller spends the whole time talking with a hand in front of their mouth?> Rachel asks.
    * Marco considers, antennae twitching.  <In that case you’re screwed.>
    * <But what if the person’s got, like, massive facial hair?> she says.
    * <Once again, you’re screwed.>
    * <What if the person spends the whole time looking down while talking?>
    * <Yeah, you’re screwed.>
    * <But if they’re just mumbling a lot?>
    * <Rachel, you do know how I’m going to answer that question by now, right?>
    * <This is annoying,> she grumbles.  <And frustrating.>
    * <Gee, you THINK?> he says, half-laughing.  <I had NO IDEA!>
  * The first time Marco hears his father’s voice, he’s sixteen years old.  The first time he hears it he registers surprise, because he didn’t mean to morph and yet he has a gorilla’s ears and a gorilla’s fists and a gorilla’s slow-burning rage. The first time he hears it, his father is screaming in wordless rage and fear as four controllers force his head closer to the surface of the portable yeerk pool.  The first time Marco hears his father’s voice, he is just barely on time.



**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Since I am writing outside my own culture here (I have a couple HOH family/ friends but normative hearing myself), please let me know if I am misrepresenting Deaf culture — I do want to be as accurate and respectful as possible. I know that by responding to the ask in this way I am implicitly classifying deafness as a disability, which I do apologize for and offer only the defense that this is a loose interpretation of the request. I also apologize for taking so many liberties with ASL and its transcription.
> 
> Original post [ here.](http://thejakeformerlyknownasprince.tumblr.com/post/170469460814/i-dont-know-if-youre-still-doing-the-aus-thing)


	15. What if Jake seduced a sub-visser?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Anonymous said: "okay but how do you think a Jake honeypot date would go down because I have never read anything more amazing in my life"

  * Marco volunteers for the date immediately, as the only one on the team who is single and desperate.  (Although, he admits, not desperate enough to sleep with a controller under any circumstances.)  The thing is, though, that Sub-Visser Three-Eighty-One has a type: every guy Ax and Tobias have seen her flirting with in the two weeks they’ve been following her around has been tall, dark, and handsome.
    * Everyone on the team (especially Jake) somewhat doubts Jake’s ability to act well enough to play the part, but the only idea worse than sending Jake would be sending Ax to do it, so he reluctantly volunteers for the mission.
  * The setup goes more or less according to plan: Jake arranges to bump into the sub-visser coming out of a Sharing meeting, and to their enormous luck she becomes the one to ask him for a phone number.  Jake suggests the time and the place, though, and doesn’t have to fake enthusiastic relief when she agrees.
  * The day of, Rachel spends nearly two hours dressing Jake in various combinations of the seven pairs of pants, eighteen shirts, and five and a half jackets that she bought for the occasion, before Jake throws up his hands and announces that he’s going naked if this nonsense doesn’t end soon.
    * Marco immediately declares that that would be a brilliant way to get Sub-Visser Three-Eighty-One dancing to their tune.  
    * Cassie shyly volunteers the opinion that Jake looks nice no matter what he’s wearing.  
    * Rachel tells them both to shut up, on the grounds that Jake getting arrested for public indecency would be just as bad for their plan as him showing up in the ill-fitting basketball shirt and ripped jeans he wore when he left the house this morning.
  * After Rachel’s initial attempt to teach Jake to flirt with her crashes and burns (“You’re the closest thing I have to a sister!  I can’t just  _flirt_  with you!”) she substitutes Cassie into her own role.  To her surprise, that manages to go even worse.
    * “Cassie,” Jake says, blushing so much he looks ready to pass out.  “I like many things about you.  You’re the sweetest person I know, and you’re brilliant at not just morphing, but, like,  _understanding_  the morphing.  Oh, and you’re really smart at other stuff besides.  You get people so fast, and there are all these things in science class that go way over my head that you pick up right away.  And even though I was mad about it at the time, I thought it was cool that you saved those baby skunks—”
    * “CUT!” Rachel yells.  
    * “You told me to compliment her,” Jake says indignantly.  Cassie is currently examining the toes of her shoes with intense fascination, and appears to be fighting a fit of the giggles.
    * Rachel sighs loudly.  “Not her  _personality_.  Think more  _physical_.”
    * Jake takes a huge breath and draws himself up again.  “You are, like, super strong for a girl,” he tells Cassie. “For anyone, really.  That time when you pried that fox’s jaws open to make it vomit up the wolf poison—”
    * “CUT!  Cassie, Marco, switch places!”
    * All three of them stare at Rachel in surprise for a second.  Marco becomes the first to react, sidling up and sliding his arm through Jake’s.  “So,” he coos.  “Why’d a big strong man like you want to go out with little old me, anyway?”
    * “Because…” Jake glances at Rachel, who makes go on gestures.  “Because of your hair.  It’s very, uh, nicely done.”
    * Marco flips a few strands away from his face.  “You really think it turned out okay?  I only had time to run a brush through it a few times on the way over.”
    * “Yes,” Jake says firmly.  “It is nice hair.  And… you are… Notlikeothergirls!”
    * Marco bats his eyelashes, grinning now.  “You really mean that?”
    * Jake attempts to smile as well.  “I have  _never_  in my  _life_  met  _anyone_  like you, Marco.  Seriously.”
    * “Now you’re getting it,” Rachel announces.  She and Marco high-five at their own brilliance.  Unseen, Jake and Cassie exchange a mutually baffled look and a shrug of bemusement.
  * Jake sets off for the date trailed fifty feet up by a red-tailed hawk and a northern harrier.  He’s not sure why he’s wearing three shirts right now, or why the collars on all three are sticking straight up in the air (“Trust me,” Rachel insisted, “this is gonna be all over the country five years from now.”) like he’s a pastel version of Dracula.  He’s also hoping he can take the weird flat sunglasses off soon—Rachel instructed him to hang them from the v-neck of his topmost shirt when he does—because the weather’s overcast and he feels ridiculous.
    * “What do we know so far?” he asks Tobias.
    * <Apparently, our dear little alien friend works in an arcade downtown, and is a big fan of shopping in her spare time.  Likes: purple fabrics, smelling flowers, and spicy tacos from food trucks.  Dislikes: dogs, dog owners, seriously don’t mention Homer, and small children.>
    * <Her selection of tacos was most excellent,> Ax adds.  <The driver of that food truck adds large quantities of a wonderful substance known as Sriracha to his meat and meat by-products.>
    * <So we may have sampled the taco truck ourselves.  Strictly for research purposes,> Tobias admits.  <And yeah, Sub-Visser whatever’s got taste.  Or Stacy does, jury’s still out on that one.>
    * “Stacy?” Jake asks, as loud as he dares.
    * <The name of her host?> Tobias says.  <Seriously?  Were you planning on walking up to her and being like ‘well, hello there, Iriess one-thirty-two’?>
    * “Stacy,” Jake mutters to himself, rather than admitting he forgot.  “ _Stacy_.  Stacy, Stacy, Stacy, Stacy, Stacy.”
    * <And now you sound nuts, which should make a  _real_  good first impression.>
  * At Tobias’s urging, Jake stops at a stand outside a greengrocer’s and buys a dozen daffodils for her.  He’s not sure if he’s allowed to take off the sunglasses when he’s standing under the shade of the awning, even though they make it very difficult to count out bills and change.  He does know that he is not under any circumstances to push them back into his hair, because then all the gel will make a weird crunching noise and Rachel will boil him in oil when she finds his spikes deformed.  He could probably fit the entire bouquet into one of the ridiculously large pockets on the pants that he’s  _certain_  are three sizes too large, but he tucks it under his arm instead.  “I hate this,” he mutters.
    * <Be cool,> Tobias says.  <If I could do meet-cute with Taylor in the middle of a coffee shop, you can survive ninety minutes of pumping a yeerk for recruitment tactics and Sharing plans.>
    * <I would recommend against bringing up Tobias’s decision to meet Taylor alone last March if you wish Rachel to leave the restaurant standing, Prince Jake.>
    * Jake gives them both a sickly smile of gratitude.
  * The initial meet’n’greet outside the restaurant goes reasonably well: Sub-Visser Three-Eighty-One exclaims over the daffodils, Jake remembers to call her “Stacy,” and with effort he ignores the skin-crawly sensation of Cassie (now a housefly) landing in his hair.  By the time they make it into the restaurant, Tobias and Rachel are already posed at a different table with baseball caps in place, while Marco shuffles around in a white apron busing tables and Ax (despite eight or nine promises that  _this_  time he’ll be cool around food) remains safely out of sight and out of morph on the roof.  If anything goes catastrophically wrong, the plan is for Cassie to alert Marco, who will create a diversion by overturning a dish cart while Rachel and Tobias hastily duck under the tablecloth of their own table—Rachel to morph, Tobias to demorph—as Ax provides everyone cover.  Jake’s pretty sure that if his date wants to shoot him in the head there’ll be nothing the others can do in time to stop her, but at least he knows he probably won’t end up forcibly made into a controller by the end of the evening.
  * Rachel, blatantly eavesdropping even as she holds Tobias’s hand across the table and they stare into each other’s eyes (if anyone starts looking at them too closely they start loudly sucking face) has to admit that Jake does better than she would have expected.  He asks “Stacy” where she got her shoes, laughs in a way that’s only slightly moronic when she compliments his sunglasses, and (after Tobias calls out a suggestion in thought-speak) even remembers to pull her chair out for her before she sits down.  
  * As instructed, Jake waits until after they’ve already ordered their food to turn the conversation to the reason they went to all this trouble in the first place.  He’s pretty pleased with how things are going so far, although then again he might just be light-headed from the smell of the instatan Rachel sprayed on him earlier.
    * “So,” he says.  “You’re part of the Sharing, right?  How’d you get into that in the first place?”
    * Ireiss 132 tosses a lock of Stacy’s hair over her shoulder.  “My older sister got me into it, actually.  She kept begging me and begging me to join, and then one time I just—Hey, you okay?”
    * Jake forces a laugh, doing his best not to think of Stacy, to think of Tom, to think  _but for the grace of God._.. “Sure.  Just, uh, zoned for a second.  So, the Sharing does a lot of recruitment events, right?”
    * <Don’t make her suspicious,> Tobias says unhelpfully.  <Just keep her on her toes.>
    * “Yeah, we’ve got volleyball days, cookouts on the beach, whole weekends upstate…”  She leans forward a little across the table.  “You interested in joining?”
    * <Say yes!> Cassie suggests, at almost exactly the same time Tobias says, <Tell her ‘hell no.’>  Marco, standing across the room, makes eye contact with Jake long enough to shake his head emphatically, just as Tobias adds, <Actually Rachel says to tell her yes.>
    * Jake closes his eyes for a second to find the patience  _not_ to swat at the back of his head and then throw a full plate of food at the next table over.  “I don’t know, really,” he says diplomatically.  “What do you guys do, anyway, besides sit around and eat hamburgers?”
    * “It’s all about community outreach,” Ireiss 132 says, apparently not noticing Jake’s hesitation.  “We do days where we clean up litter at the park, we raise money to fund cancer research—”
    * <Of course they do,> Cassie says darkly.  <Can’t have anything wrong with their prospective slaves, right?>
    * Jake, having missed the end of that sentence, has to make an educated guess.  “Sounds pretty cool.  Don’t you have, like, celebrity endorsements?”
    * “Oh, sure.  There’s Jeremy Jason McCole, William Roger Tennant…” Ireiss ticks the names off on Stacy’s left hand.  “That blond lady with the cooking show, Senator Malesin, Senator Argo, Angelina Jolie—”
    * < _Angelina Jolie_? > Tobias says.  
    * Cassie gasps.  <But she seems like such a nice lady on TV!>
    * <Who is Angelina Jolie?  Is Prince Jake okay?>
    * <He’s fine.  However, Rachel would like me to pass along a few comments with strong language about Angelina Jolie’s lifestyle, dress, and immediate ancestors.>
    * “Shut  _up_!” Jake hisses.
    * Ireiss blinks at him a few times.
    * Jake clears his throat.  “I just mean…” He changes his inflection.  “Shut up!  As in, you’re kidding me!  You think maybe I could meet her sometime?”
    * “Join the Sharing,” Ireiss says.  “We could make it happen.  Once you get initiated as a full member your whole life opens up before you—you can’t imagine what it’s like.”
    * Jake forces another smile.  He picks up his fork.  This helps him to avoid giving into the urge to clamp both hands over his ears, slide under the table, and scream something about how they can never have his body.  He can  _imagine_  the experience a little too well, and it’s not something he’s ever letting happen again.  


  * Nonetheless, Jake manages to keep lightly deflecting Ireiss’s recruitment attempts while also digging for information, clear through until Marco—with a flourish—brings them a plate of mini cannoli for dessert.  After he ducks away from their table he sweeps over to begin polishing the corner of Rachel and Tobias’s.
    * <Marco says he wants you to save him one, because they look delicious,> Tobias says a minute later.
    * Jake, who has just been distracted in the middle of Ireiss’s description of how they draw in community members to Sharing meetings, makes a mental note to define the term  _radio silence_ for the entire team when they get home.  Then he picks up the last cannoli, very pointedly licks it, and puts it back on the plate uneaten.
    * <Marco says, and I quote, that there are ‘children starving in Montana’ that you are ‘not the man he fell in love with,’ and that he is ‘wounded to the depths of his soul.’  By the way, you do know not to offer to pay for dinner, right?  Because you don’t actually want to get a second date out of this.>
    * “You were saying?” Jake says loudly.
    * Ireiss clears Stacy’s throat.  “Oh, just that we really feel reaching out to vulnerable kids—as through the youth shelter I mentioned, and the after-school program—is the best way to offer them the Sharing as an alternative to gang membership.”
    * Jake dearly hopes that someone is taking notes on all of this, because if he suffered through the application of that much instatan for nothing he’s going to strangle someone.  “That’s really cool.  So is there, like, a place where you keep track of all the Sharing’s full members?  Some kind of database or something?”
    * <Too strong, too strong,> Cassie says.  
    * <Prince Jake, Cassie and Tobias have now been in morph for one-hundred-eight of your minutes.  May I suggest that you put a wrap in it?>
    * <So close, Ax-Man, and yet so far.>
    * “…nothing that formal,” Ireiss is saying.  “Hoping for more celebrities?”
    * “You know what?”  Jake stands up.  “It’s been real.  But I’ve got a thing, so…”
    * Tobias is right: he emphatically doesn’t want a second date.  Waving at Stacy, Jake pivots and walks out the door without another word.
  * They assemble in Cassie’s barn later that evening, Jake attempting to get one of Cassie’s horse-brushes through the horrible gel-stiff mess of his hair as everyone else trickles in.  “Okay,” he says wearily, when they’re all present, “What did we learn today?”
    * “For starters,” Marco says, “That Tobias is apparently romantic as hell.  Were I not healthily terrified of your beautiful and homicidal cousin, I would already be trying to hit that like a—”
    * <Before you can go any further, no.>  Tobias glares at Marco.  <Also, to answer your next question, I am also not interested in a threesome.>
    * “ _Besides_  that.”  Jake rubs a hand over his face, smearing the makeup that Rachel insisted isn’t makeup across his skin.  “What else?”
    * “I learned that, on second thought, lime green is not your color.”  Rachel frowns.  “I’m not sure the look works at all.  You can take the boy out of the WalMart jeans, but you can’t take the WalMart jeans out of the boy, I guess.”
    * “Can we  _please_  stay on topic?” Jake asks.
    * “Angelina Jolie’s a controller.”  Cassie smiles sympathetically at Jake.  “So are two of California’s state senators, and a handful of B-list actors.  The Sharing is recruiting at the youth shelter, which is just all kinds of gross and awful, and they’re making a push to move into more schools across the county.”
    * <Also,> Ax adds, <We have the names of several more businesses that have donated to the Sharing, and are therefore possible yeerk pool entrances.  I suggest we start with further research on Burt’s Taco Truck, although I sincerely doubt that any yeerk would have that magnificent grasp of the subtleties of spicy and umami.  Still, it warrants much more extensive exploration.>
  * They rehash everything Ireiss 132 said, hinted at, or confirmed in response to Jake’s questions for nearly two more hours.  By the end of it they’ve got a decent plan in place for how to ensure the Sharing can’t spread any more feelers into any more parts of the community, and the beginnings of an idea for how to discredit the whole organization.  By then it’s getting late, so Jake and Marco and Rachel all split off to head home.
    * There’s a note pinned on the fridge when Jake walks in.  _Midget— Some chick keeps calling the house wanting to know when she’ll see you again.  Call her back or get rid of her, but stop clogging up the line with your dumb teenage nonsense._
    * Jake stares at it in incredulity for several seconds.  “Goddamn yeerks,” he says at last, and balls it up to throw in the trash.  



**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The rebloggable post is [ here.](http://thejakeformerlyknownasprince.tumblr.com/post/161047209409/okay-but-how-do-you-think-a-jake-honeypot-date)


	16. What if they rescued Alloran in #8?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Anonymous said: "What do you think would have happened if Alloran somehow morphed in book 8 so he stopped dying of snake poison and escaped the Yeerks and the Animorphs ended up hanging out with a ruthless, terrifying war prince?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Additional warnings this chapter for implied character death and references to genocide.

  * Ax is safe from controllers for the moment, which is why Marco lumbers over to where Visser Three’s host is lying on the ground.  <Come on,> he snaps, dragging the half-dead andalite upright.  <Either morph and help us fight, or wait around like a useless lump for the yeerks to start using you again.  Dying heroically doesn’t solve anything.>
    * As he speaks, Rachel swipes a grizzly paw into the river.  Almost casually, she flattens the small grey-green body onto the ground until it pops with a squelch.
    * The andalite host starts to protest Marco’s attempts to yank him away, but by then Rachel and Ax have both come over to drag him to safety as well, and he gives in.  He morphs, some kind of bird with way too many wings and a razor-sharp beak, and follows them.
  * Unbeknownst to the newly freed War-Prince Alloran-Semitur-Corrass, an intense debate rages throughout the entire forty-minute flight back to Ax’s scoop.  Marco doesn’t think they should trust him with anything until they have more information.  Rachel cannot wait to get him on board, given how much fighting experience he must have.  Cassie thinks that they should wait and see what Alloran wants, whereas Tobias insists that if Ax worked out this well then Alloran will too.  Jake and Ax, as always, stay out of the debate.
    * Until the moment of decision comes, that is.  And then Jake, as they’re landing on the ground, says <We can’t keep it from him forever.  Might as well see how he reacts right now,> and the issue is decided.  As one, they begin to demorph.
    * As it turns out, _how he reacts_  is with about two and a half minutes of incredulous silence, staring at all six of them at once.  Even the human Animorphs can tell that if he had a mouth, it would be hanging open.
    * And then he bursts out laughing.
    * Cassie flinches, because it’s still Visser Three’s laugh, but after a second she finds herself relaxing.  The andalite has his face buried in one hand, shoulders shaking with that silent laughter, in a way that is distinctly unvisserish.  “Yeah,” she says, spreading her arms out apologetically.  “We’re human.  Most of us, anyway.”
    * <Human  _children_ ,> he says slowly.  <Who destroyed the ground-based Kandrona.  Who annihilated a veleek.> He continues to stare at all of them—and then both stalk eyes focus on Ax.  <This is Elfangor’s doing, isn’t it?> he asks.
    * Ax shifts in place, one hoof kicking nervously against the ground.  <He made a choice of desperation in his last moments of life.>
    * <Of course he gave away our most precious technology to a group of humans.> The andalite prince seems almost fond, underneath the exasperation.  <Of  _course_  he did.>
    * <You knew Prince Elfangor?> Tobias asks.
    * <Yes, and I know he wouldn’t have left you without a prince if he’d had a choice in the matter.> The andalite straightens, shaking out his tail.  <But no matter.  I can take on that responsibility now.  My name is War-Prince Alloran-Semitur-Corrass, and I am here to help you.  Dismissed, arisths.  Return to this place at the seventh hour of the Earthly time system tomorrow.  In the meantime, I have many questions for Aristh Aximili.>
  * They all go, mostly because it doesn’t seem worth fighting him about, although Marco grumbles about it the whole way home.  Jake broods on the issue for the rest of the afternoon, wondering if it would be for the best for him simply to hand over leadership.  He barely even notices when Tom’s gone for almost the entire day—some emergency at the Sharing, allegedly—and he doesn’t arrive at an easy answer.
  * Things don’t come to a head until a couple weeks later, when Alloran flatly refuses to listen to Cassie’s concerns about the potential for logging in the woods where the andalites and Tobias live.  <It’s a pity about the trees, yes, but it is not our concern right now,> Alloran says impatiently.  <We need to focus on taking out the empire’s top vissers while the power vacuum from Esplin’s death remains unfilled.  This silly worry about the local land is just one more distraction—>
    * “I don’t think it’s silly.”  Jake speaks quietly, but his voice is firm.
    * <Be that as it may.> Alloran flicks his tail dismissively. <I know the yeerks, and as the ranking officer—>
    * “Let’s get something straight, bub.”  Marco steps up to stand at Jake’s left shoulder, looking halfway shocked at his own daring.  “I’ve only got one prince, and it’s this loser right here.”  He nudges Jake with his elbow. 
    * < _Excuse_  me?>  Alloran’s whole body has gone stiff.  Marco looks very small where he stands staring Alloran down.
    * “Look,” Rachel says, “Jake hasn’t led us wrong yet.  No offense, but we don’t know you.  We don’t trust you.  Jake’s one of us, and if you two don’t agree… We’re gonna go with Jake.”  She crosses her arms, stepping forward to stand behind Marco.
    * <It’s not that we think you’re wrong,> Tobias offers, more gently.  <It’s just…> He flares, landing gently on Rachel’s shoulder.  <Well, Jake’s got a point that Cassie’s got a point.>
    * Ax doesn’t say a word.  He just takes three steps, until he is standing directly behind Jake’s right shoulder. 
    * The silence while they wait for Alloran’s response seems to last for years.  The only one who looks more surprised by all this than Alloran is Jake himself.
    * <Very well,> Alloran says at last.  <Prince Jake,> —and if there’s a hint of mockery to the title, they choose not to notice— <it seems you have won the unflinching loyalty of every one of your warriors.  That is commendation enough for me.  What is it you suggest we do?>
  * They work out an arrangement of sorts, wherein Jake is their field commander but Alloran gives them a lot of advice in their down time.  Marco might grumble about “school all day, then homework, then what do we do with our tiny amounts of spare time? Oh goody, more homework!” but the truth is that most of what Alloran teaches them is  _useful_.  He drills them on morphing fast, morphing smoothly, morphing without losing control, and they all improve to the point where the others can almost— _almost_ —match Cassie in skill.  
    * Under his tutelage they all learn the frolis maneuver to combine sets of DNA from the same species, which means that, through mixing Alloran’s DNA with Ax’s, they can each develop a unique andalite morph.  Their subsequent set of andalites might look like very closely-related siblings, but at least the morphs enable them to maintain the illusion that they are all andalite bandits.
    * Tobias becomes the last one to get an andalite shape, during the frantic period of catch-up after he regains the ability to morph.  He uses more of Ax’s DNA than Alloran’s, and the subsequent form ends up (whether by accident or deliberately) looking startlingly like Elfangor.
    * Alloran is not a particularly patient or kind teacher, but he does get results from all of them as he snaps at them time after time that their best attempts are  _not good enough_  and won’t be until every one of them can master rodent shapes without losing control.  He and Marco butt heads on a fairly regular basis, and Rachel has been known to stomp away from his biting criticism in a fit of rage, but they always learn to get along in the end.  And they learn not just morphing tricks, but how to fight with tail blades and guns and knives and stolen dracon beams.  They study past battles, and learn ways to do better.  Alloran gives them no rest, but he also keeps them alive.
    * It’s odd, Ax thinks, and Alloran would probably deny it if asked, but he seems to be more patient with Tobias.  It might just be his awareness that Tobias came to the game later than any of the others, or even some degree of sympathy for all nothlits, but Alloran is far less inclined to snap at Tobias’s small mistakes.  He shows almost as much concern for Tobias’s well-being as Jake or Cassie might, which is strange when Alloran himself is also “roughing it” (as Marco would say) out in the woods.
  * Under Visser One’s influence, the invasion of Earth grows terrifying new tendrils.  Politicians in state capitols and even the White House start scheduling mysterious appointments once every three days.  The Sharing gains official nonprofit status, and opens chapters in every state in the country.  Voluntary hosts get offered power and wealth and fame in the New Yeerk Order if they will just agree to give up their bodies for a few years while the revolution occurs.  Alloran insists that Edriss is five times the strategist Esplin ever was, and pretty soon they all agree with him.
  * Jake isn’t the only one to notice that Alloran returns to the construction site where Elfangor died, but he is the only one brave enough to ask about it.  It just happens one time that Jake’s walking home and sees a very familiar young man (comprised of DNA that has bits of Mr. Tidwell and Visser Three’s human shape and the Animorphs themselves) leaning against the chain link fence to look at the abandoned earthmovers.
    * Alloran hesitates for a long time after Jake voices the question, but at last he explains.  “Elfangor was flying a damaged fighter, injured, in trouble.  Any sensible prince would have returned to his Dome ship, or at least sought his companions’ assistance.  Instead, he came—”  He gestures toward the fence.  “Here.”
    * Jake looks over at him.  “You think Elfangor was trying to do something.  Other than give us the power to morph, that is.”
    * “I think he was looking for something,” Alloran says.  “Or someone.  The only person he’d be likely to seek out on Earth would be little use in a fight, so it’d be an odd burst of sentiment indeed if she was what he sought, whereas…”  Again, he pauses, looking Jake over.  Whatever he sees causes him to continue.  “Whereas if he was looking for an object… The last time I saw him before his death, Elfangor was headed for Earth with the with the most powerful weapon in the known universe in his possession.”
    * Jake feels a chill.  Automatically he turns, scanning the cracked concrete and half-constructed walls.  He’s not sure he trusts Alloran with a weapon that powerful.  “What’s it look like, this thing Elfangor had?”
    * “Spherical.  An opalescent sort of white color.  Approximately one hundred forty inches in diameter.”  Alloran sighs heavily enough that his shoulders lower.  “The problem is, this is all speculation.  For all I know, Elfangor destroyed the damn thing out of some misguided sense of idealism.  For all I know he was just looking for Loren and the Time Matrix is nowhere near here.  For all I know his knowledge of its location was approximate, or his calculations were off, or his ship was too badly damaged to reach its location, and it’s hundreds of miles from here.”
    * “And for all you know, we’re standing within spitting distance of a weapon that could end the war tomorrow,” Jake finishes.
    * They stand there for a long time, looking out at the scattered cinderblocks and jagged edges of rebar.  And then they move on.
  * When Alloran arrives back at the scoop he set up not far from Ax’s, Tobias is standing there.  Human.  Tears painting his face.  Shoulders shaking, hands balled into fists.
    * “You knew,” he says.  “This entire time, you knew.  And you never said a word.”
    * Alloran finds himself looking away entirely, main eyes pointed at the ground and stalk eyes scanning behind him in a blatant ploy to avoid eye contact.  <There was speculation, inside the Yeerk Empire, after Iniss 226 stumbled on your school records.  That, and—>  He shifts his weight onto his back hooves.  <Your resemblance to your mother is… striking.>
    * Tobias swipes tears away with an angry jerk of the back of his hand, almost like he’s hitting himself in the face.  “And you never  _once_  thought that  _maybe_  I should know?“
    * <Would you believe,> Alloran says slowly, <that I did not tell you out of a desire to protect young Aximili?  We are taught never to speak ill of the dead, and Elfangor was one of the few I would have counted as friend even after I was taken by the yeerks.  To speak for him to his brother, to reveal secrets that he chose to keep, after such time as he could no longer speak for himself, would have been to dishonor his memory to Aximili.>
    * “Sure.  When he gets back, you can ask Ax about that one for yourself.”  Tobias turns away, demorphing.  
    * <Tobias—>  Alloran waits until the boy pauses.  <You would have made him proud, a thousand times over.>
    * <Guess we’ll never know now, will we?>  Tobias takes off at top speed and wheels away.  He turns in the direction of the hork-bajir valley, just before he soars out of sight.
  * Alloran thinks that they would have all made Elfangor proud, in the end.  He’s a poor substitute for the commander they need, but he can guide them the best he can all the same.  He’s there, in bievilerd morph and killing taxxon-controllers at top speed, when they rescue Tobias from Sub-Visser Fifty-One’s failed interrogation, and he tears Taylor’s head off her shoulders without a hint of remorse.  He’s there, a nameless monster from the hork-bajir’s Father Deep, when Jake stays their hand in the face of a whirlpool filled with helpless yeerks.  He’s there to witness as Edriss’s host tumbles off the face of a cliff and Marco speaks with detached calm of revenge.  He’s there as Ax guides his human friends through the ritual of mourning following the destruction of the yeerk pool, and as Cassie proves to him with shocking finality that not every yeerk alive is worth destroying.
  * And then, on the eve of the final battle, Jake pulls him aside for a private conversation.  He speaks not as a commander to a subordinate, or even as one war-prince to another, but as a friend asking a difficult and terrible favor of a friend.  That, Alloran thinks, is the truest mark of all that this boy was born to lead.
    * <I am the servant of my people,> Alloran says, once Jake is done making his request.  <And of my prince.  I have no honor left to give, but my life is not my own, and freely given for a worthy cause.>
    * Jake swallows.  “Then you think… you think I’m making the right call?”
    * <I am not the person to ask about questions of morality.  However…>  Alloran considers, choosing his next words carefully.  <My brother, Arbat, tried to kill me not long after I was taken by the yeerks,> he tells Jake.  <I felt gratitude, and relief, and the wish that he would succeed.  Not just for his own sake, or for the sake of our ancestors.  For the sake of my Jahar, and the daughter I never knew except as a wish-flower.  And for my own sake as well.  It was a gesture of mercy, driven by love, and I recognized it as such.>
    * “Okay, then,” Jake whispers, after swallowing a few more times.  His eyes are unfocused, watching a point somewhere in middle distance.  “Okay.”
  * Jake tells Toby and Eva and James—all his lieutenants—what they have planned.  Toby, who dislikes Alloran even more openly than all the other hork-bajir in the valley, becomes the first to respond.  “Funny,” she says, “that you are willing to die protecting so many lesser creatures.”
    * <I know that there is no balance, no forgiveness, no recompense, for what I have done,> Alloran says.  <I only seek to make right what little is within my power to make right.  To learn what I can, and to use what I have already learned.  Which is why I ask your permission to die for this cause, when we both understand how that death will be remembered.>
    * “Maybe you  _have_  learned a thing or two along the way,” Eva murmurs.
    * Toby nods solemnly.  “Go in peace, and may you…”  She pauses to find honest words rather than kind ones.  “May you be remembered for the entirety of your life, up to and including its final moments.”
    * Alloran bows his head, and then drops to his knees before her.  It’s only when she rests a gentle claw on the back of his neck in benediction that he rises, and morphs, and flies away.



**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The rebloggable post is [ here.](http://thejakeformerlyknownasprince.tumblr.com/post/166685108234/what-do-you-think-would-have-happened-if-alloran)


	17. What if Tom was infested by a member of the Yeerk Peace Movement?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An anon said: "I just read the tocsin (thanks to you mentioning it) and it made me wonder, how do you think all the war would have been affected in the long run if Tom's yeerk was replaced by a peace movement one just like in that fic?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Additional warnings this chapter for character death and implied mentions of torture and assault. Premise taken with permission from Beth Epstein's [ The Tocsin](http://home.earthlink.net/~tptigger42/tocsin.html).

  * Aftran 942 lurches her Gedd body along the perimeter of the Yeerk Pool, trying to keep the host’s simple mind from detecting any of her near-panic.  She knows a test when she sees one, and this — an offer of a new host, an involuntary human one, so soon after she gave up Karen as allegedly too brain damaged to be of use — is a test with a trap concealed on the other side.  The vissers want to know if she’s become too sympathetic to the humans, if she even wants a new host at all.  (Of course she wants a new host.  Wants one the way a taxxon wants meat.  The way a junkie wants heroin.  Her promise with Cassie — life as a worm for life as a worm — has been the sole fraying cord of willpower keeping her craving for eyes and hands in check.)
    * And so here she is, drawing to a stop outside the cage with the currently-unclaimed human hosts, choosing one under Derane 731’s watchful gaze.  Aftran’s just going to have to break her promise if she doesn’t want to end up betraying the whole Peace Movement.
    * Even with these weak eyes, Aftran spares him a second glance.  Mostly because of the girl in his arms.  Whereas the other hosts cower in fear or slump in resigned apathy, he sits near the front, whispering some comforting lie to the little girl (too much like Karen, entirely too much) who cries and clings to his shirt sleeve.
    * But then he lifts his head up, and the weary defiance in his eyes shifts the resemblance to his brother from  _faint_  to  _unmistakable_.
    * Aftran’s never seen Tom Berenson before, but Cassie has.  From Cassie’s secondhand memories, she knows: the Animorphs’ own prince has a controller living inside his house.
    * “The-rrrrr male in-rr frrrront,” Aftran growls with the Gedd’s voice.  Here’s her chance to get close to the Animorphs, to help out in this fight.
    * “You.  Up.”  Derane 731 kicks the bars.  The boy ignores her at first — until she reaches for the shock prod that rests at the ready next to the cage.  Then he scrambles to his feet.
    * _Well-trained_ , Aftran thinks with a new surge of old anger.
    * Derane glances down at her comm screen.  “Male, 17 years old, student, otherwise unemployed.  Two previous owners in the past 18 months.  Temrash 114 had to deal with the usual adjustment struggles at first, but assured us that he’s been thoroughly broken since then.  Good physical condition. Mostly used in recruitment, occasionally for security.”
    * Throughout this recitation, the piece of meat in question stares at the far wall of the Yeerk Pool, arms loose at his sides, legs braced apart, expression blank — mostly.  Looking closer, Aftran can see that his jaw is clenched slightly as his back teeth grind together, that his right hand is curled into a fist at his side.  Maybe not so broken, then.  Good.  She’ll need all the fight she can get out of him.
    * “…moderate amount of combat experience.” Derane is still reading. “Enough athletic muscle memory that the body can easily be taught new skills.  Has few commitments outside of the occasional appearance at high school and nights spent with the family.  Family itself’s no concern, two parents, one sibling, none of them our people.”
    * Aftran pretends to consider for a minute.  “This-rrr one,” she says.  “I’ll take hrrrim.”
  * “Hey midget, we need to talk.”
    * Jake bends his head a little further over his page of Algebra problems, shoulders tensing.  “Really not in the mood to hear about the utter wonderfulness of the Sharing, Tom—”
    * _Thunk_.
    * Slowly Jake looks up at the object Tom has set on the kitchen table.  It’s a mason jar, filled most of the way with water.  Swimming through the fluid inside is a single live yeerk.
    * Jake stares at it in shock for several seconds, and then he lifts his head the rest of the way to make eye contact with Tom.
    * “Like I said.”  Tom raises his eyebrows.  “We need to talk.”
  * And talk they do.  For over an hour.  Eventually Tom puts Aftran back in his brain, and she answers Jake’s questions as well: about the Peace Movement, about Visser Three’s suspicion toward her, about Illim and the others.
    * Jake recognizes that this is all too much for him to wrap his head around.  He summons Cassie (who enthusiastically vouches for Aftran after pointing out that she is herself no longer a caterpillar), Ax (who is openly skeptical of Cassie’s vouching), Rachel (who glares suspiciously at Tom but then suddenly pulls him into a rough hug with a muttered comment about how he’s a jerk and she didn’t miss him at all), Tobias (who asks Aftran a ton more about the structure of the Yeerk Pool), and Marco (who spends over an hour asking leading questions in an effort to prove that Tom has gone voluntary and ganged up with a yeerk only pretending to be Aftran as part of some grand conspiracy to kill them all).
    * Already by the end of that meeting, they’ve worked out a system of sorts where Aftran speaks in a voice that is higher, rapider, more clipped than Tom’s natural inflection.  It makes it much easier to tell the two of them apart, and also that much weirder when they both use Tom’s voice to converse out loud with each other.
  * Over the next several weeks, the two of them work out a complex but mutually beneficial system.  Aftran lets Tom take the wheel the overwhelming majority of the time, lurking in the back of his mind as a presence that would be beyond notice if not for her nearly-constant commentary on his life (some of it helpful, most of it snarky).  Tom will let Aftran have control for up to a few hours at a time if she wants to try something new — shooting hoops, playing Sega, drinking Diet Coke with pop-rocks — but normally he’s the one who does almost everything.  She’s only had to take control by force once or twice in emergency situations, and it’s never a pleasant experience: Tom tends to panic and start fighting back on instinct, whereas Aftran herself cannot stand the skin-crawling experience of playing puppeteer to an unwilling body.  Whenever possible, they give way to each other as the need arises.
  * They start stockpiling shoes.  Not just shoes; jackets, loose jeans, water bottles and snacks.  Feeder mice.  Organic planter grass.  Blankets.  Cash, for unforeseen needs.
    * And then they keep an ear to the ground.  They wait for the yeerks’ signals and code words and calls for help that indicate the andalite bandits have attacked another facility, another kandrona shipment, another meeting.  They jump in the car and rush out to whichever location, ready to tell anyone that tries to intercept them that they’re there to help the Sharing Relief Services.
  * Another mission, another half-garbled radio report, and now Tom is driving slow, scanning the outer walls of the basement parking garage, until…  <There!> Aftran says, and he throws the minivan into reverse.
    * The sweep of their headlights catches five huddled figures, dwarfed by the pair of dumpsters they crouch between.  It’s a clear January night, chilly by Southern California standards, but none of them seem to notice the cold.  Rachel and Marco are glaring in two different directions, Jake and Ax peering warily at the headlights.  Cassie just stares into space, seeing nothing.  There’s no sign of Tobias.
    * _Shit_ , Tom thinks.  Aftran wordlessly agrees.  He hits the button to slide the van’s back door open.  “Tobias?” Tom says out loud, voice gruff.
    * <I can go after him,> Ax offers.  So at least none of them are dead.
    * The others slouch into the back seat.  Aftran nudges Tom until he digs out a packet of tissues and hands it to Cassie, for the tears running down her face.  Tom cranks the heat up all on his own, even though he’s pretty sure that neither the trembling in Rachel’s clenched fists nor the tight huddle where Jake hugs himself come from the cold.
    * Tom and Aftran have this tendency to build on each other’s moods; they’re both angry, passionate people, prone to throwing themselves at righteous-seeming causes as common sense drags behind.  Right now they’re in a feedback loop of silent rage: at the Yeerk Empire, at this crappy world, at the violence of it all.  They want to dig Tom’s fingers into Visser Three’s body and rip its antennae and fins off one by one.  They want to grow enormous and dangerous a the others do and smash the very foundations of the Yeerk Pool cages in an insatiable rampage.
    * Instead, Tom guides the car back toward the highway.  Instead, Aftran accesses his voice with their usual  _may-I?—go-ahead_ ritual, and says “We’re stopping at McDonald’s.  My treat.  You all need a hot meal, and then I’ll get you home.”
  * They have other concerns as well.  Building the movement is a careful process, cautious by necessity.  They always start by dropping hints, feeling out, testing the waters, well before they make any kind of open move.  Tom will usually direct all his attention to maintaining the conversation, Aftran to observing every shift of expression or tone.  They become very good at detecting deception, detecting discontent, among their fellow controllers.  They work, and ever-so-slowly the Peace Movement grows.
    * It’s one of those probes, one of those hints, that lands them something they never expected: Odret 177 explaining with near-fanatical excitement that Aftran, who clearly doesn’t like Visser Three either, can get in on the ground floor of Visser One’s coming coup d’état.  The overthrow is coming, Odret assures them, and Aftran should join now while the groundwork’s still being laid.
    * Aftran recognizes the opportunity for what it is, of course.  The only trick is convincing the others to let her use it.
    * “We expose Visser One’s treachery once we’re close enough,” she explains to the Animorphs, Tom drumming his fingers on one knee as he waits for her to finish.  “By then we’ll have dirt on Visser Three as well.  We throw them both to the Council of Thirteen for the self-serving backstabbers they are, and…”
    * “And people die,” Cassie says flatly.  “Yeerks.  Hosts.  Dozens of conspirators, and the bodies they’re using.  Marco’s mom.”
    * Tom and Aftran remain outwardly silent, arguing internally over how much to tell the others.  A different debate forms around them, voices rising as Jake cautions that they need to think this through and Rachel announces that kicking visser butt is their reason for existence and Ax speculates about how the Empire’s structure would change if they succeed and Tobias wryly comments that it’ll be moot if they fail and Cassie reminds them to think of the hosts and Marco insists that he doesn’t give a damn about the cost, none of them should, this is a war and war means sacrifice, and they need to be honest with themselves that none of them would be hesitating if Visser One wasn’t… if she wasn’t… if she…
    * _May-I?—go-ahead_.  “We do this, I’d make visser,” Aftran says in Tom’s voice, cutting through the hullabaloo.  “The Council rewards this kind of behavior lavishly.  With that kind of power…”  A shrug.  “Point being, it’d be huge.”
    * It’s Jake who’s shrewd enough to ask: “And what if you  _don’t_  do it?”
    * A shift; now it’s definitely Tom speaking.  “Not clear, but we can’t go on indefinitely.  Aftran’s supposed to be recruiting eight new Sharing members a month — we brought in two this last quarter.  And the yeerks don’t tolerate incompetence for long.  It’ll be a different yeerk slipped inside me next feeding to look through my memories, or a visser given the chance to question Aftran until she cracks, or just a dracon beam to the head.”  He takes a breath. “We die no matter what, but we might end up giving up all of you along the way.”
    * There’s a long silence, and then Marco snaps, “That decides it.  Just tell us what to do.”
  * Infiltration within infiltration proves brain-twisting.  Aftran’s pretending to be a Visser One sycophant pretending to be a loyal Empire supporter as she pretends not to care about any non-yeerk on the planet; Tom mostly just pretends to be involuntary but sometimes he has to pretend to be Aftran.  Over time, the framework emerges: Visser One, still angry at Visser Three (mis)managing what was supposed to be her pet planet, has dozens of agents in place recording his every short-sighted decision and fit of temper.  The database, and its source, incriminate both vissers.
    * From there, they just need to wait until the next off-planet inspection, and to catch the Council of Thirteen agent alone.  When their chance comes, it’s Aftran who bites on Tom’s lip in a performance of nerves, Tom who lets an obsequious whine slip into his voice as he hands over the lovingly-documented drive and claims that as a loyal servant of the Empire one just couldn’t live with the guilt anymore.
    * They expected the shouting and recrimination from Visser Three and the Garatron inspector both.  They expected the dozens of arrests, and the sharp resistance.  They were the only ones who knew to expect the Animorphs’ attack on the Yeerk Pool in the immediate aftermath.
    * They didn’t really expect the moment when Visser Three sends the inspector’s head rolling across the floor and is himself shot dead by dozens of Council security members.  They definitely weren’t expecting Visser One to accept arrest calmly, only to announce to everyone within earshot that the “andalite bandits” are not andalites at all, but rather—
    * There was no plan for the moment Eva’s body stiffened, her neck snapping back and her right hand coming halfway up toward the hole in her chest before she collapsed.  Nothing on the books for the clatter of the dracon beam hitting the ground as Rachel released it from her delicate elephant’s trunk, having just saved all their lives, nor yet Marco’s human scream and gorilla bellow overlapping.  (Once again, Aftran reacts, saving them: she scoops a shredder into Tom’s hands and fires at the Animorphs, missing by a safe margin but providing the cover they need to make a messy retreat.)
    * Most surprising of all, however, is the Council of Thirteen member — an enormous taxxon-controller in a billowing crimson robe — who steps delicately from the Blade ship perched at the entrance of the Yeerk Pool, seconds after the Animorphs have disappeared and the danger is gone.
    * Aftran knew what to expect, or thought she did.  She  _expected_  a promotion.  Not for the council-member to literally wave a two-fingered hand in dismissal as he casually announces that Aftran 942 shall be the new Visser One, that she should appoint a new Visser Three at her discretion, and that he trusts she’ll make  _cleaning up this mess_ her first priority.
  * Aftran’s outward stunned silence lasts as long as it takes the Council and their myriad security forces to retreat.  Inwardly, she and Tom are a swirling chaos of overlapping thoughts:  _did-they-just?—what-do-we-do—fuck,Eva,that’s—how-do-we—Visser-One?—VISSER-ONE?_
    * There are close to four thousand controllers in the Yeerk Pool, all looking at them.  Waiting.  “Visser…?” Derane 731 says at last.
    * “What if we didn’t have to be enslavers?”  Aftran whispers it, but Tom takes a huge breath, sending her oxygen, sending her strength.  As one, they step up onto the deinfestation pier.  “My fellow warriors!   _What if we didn’t have to be enslavers?_ ”  This time, Tom’s voice echoes off the surface of the pool, reflecting to the concave ceiling.
    * The cavern falls silent around them.  Even the caged hosts watch and wait.
    * “You heard the Council: I’m in charge around here,” Aftran announces.  “And it’s high time for a change, for an end to the fighting,” Tom adds.  “So I say, as Visser One: we need to find another way.”  Aftran.  “It  _is_  possible to ask rather than demand.  To borrow rather than steal.”  Tom.  “To morph, and to stop using hosts at all.”  Aftran, catching Tom by surprise with that one.  “We’re a part of the movement that seeks an end to the violence, and soon we'll be joined by every other visser on this planet.”  Tom again.  “You can join us, or you can surrender.  Those are really the only options.”  Aftran.
    * They’re both breathing hard by the end, fear-sweat prickling Tom’s arms.  Now is the moment.  There are about two dozen Peace Movement members in the crowd around them.  Two dozen… against four thousand.
    * “You could get us all voluntary hosts?”  It’s Iniss 226 who speaks, clearly suspicious.
    * “Every  _single_  yeerk would have the chance either to use a voluntary host or to morph.”  Aftran’s making promises wildly, brashly.   _So it begins_ , Tom thinks at her; they’re politicians now, whether they like it or not.  “The involuntaries would be released, or asked to stay on with a re-negotiation of autonomy.  It would require change, but we will make it happen.”
    * The crowd is murmuring, controllers nudging one another.  Voluntary hosts are desperately valuable, because the honest truth is that almost none of them want involuntary control if they have another way.  The only thing better than a voluntary host is the desperate hope to change one’s body entirely, permanently, to  _become_  another being…
    * They negotiate, and continue negotiating, until Tom’s voice runs out.  They give orders — to bury the dead, to free the involuntary hosts, to communicate the policy to the rest of the Earth invasion force — and share in their shock at being obeyed.  Finally, at long last, they get the chance to leave Illim and Mr. Tidwell (now sharing the title of Visser Three) to continue working on the details, and to retreat back to Cassie’s barn to make their most audacious move yet.
    * After all, they need a morphing cube.
  * The next three hours are an exercise in exhaustion.  Marco, irate and bereaved, reverts back to mistrusting Aftran; Ax accuses them both of letting the power go to their head.  Jake wearily calls a vote, and then shrugs helplessly when it ends in a tie.  Finally it’s Cassie who stands up, walks to her father’s refrigerator, pulls out the cube, and slaps it into Tom’s hand.  She spins around, chin up, silently daring the others to challenge her.  No one does.
  * The next three weeks are a chore.  Tobias later compares the process of getting the yeerks’ Earth forces aligned under the Peace Movement to trying to stuff an octopus into a boot: every time they get one tentacle inside, they discover two more have untied the laces and leaked out through the side.  The wily, many-armed resistance evades in a thousand ways… but Aftran and her allies have the simple majority on their side.  The shift comes, and the yeerks shift with it.
  * “Of all the insane things we’ve done in this whole insane war,” Marco says, “this is the most insane of them all.  There’s no topping this insanity.  None.”
    * <There better not be, anyway,> Tobias drawls.
    * Jake offers them both a small, tight smile.  It’s good to hear them blowing off steam.  Tobias seems in and out at times since Taylor, whereas Marco’s just been quieter overall since they lost Eva.  Everything’s about to change, and he needs them both on board.
    * “You’re up, midget,” Tom says, and gestures to where Ax hovers one delicate finger over the button that will switch on the broadcast.
    * Jake straightens up, runs a hand through his hair, glances at where Rachel and Cassie stand on either side of him.  “Okay,” he whispers.
    * <Prince Jake, you’ll be live, as they say, in five… four… three…>  There’s a click, and a faint  _whirrrrrrr_.  It doesn’t look that impressive from this end, but every television on the planet has just been forcibly switched to the view of three adolescent kids in spandex standing in front of a studio wall.
    * “Hello.  My name is Jake Berenson.  And I’m here to tell you all that this is no prank or stunt: aliens are, in fact, invading the planet.”  Jake beckons slightly, and Ax steps forward until he is within view of the camera.  “There are enough of us to fight back and even to win,” Jake says, “but we need your help to do it.  There are two forces coming for Earth.  One is sent by the Yeerk Empire.”  He gestures, and Tom gently places Aftran into his hands.  Jake holds her out to the camera.  “The yeerks are a parasitic species, and they are coming to take this planet back from their own rebel faction.  The other…”  He steps back, ceding the floor to Ax.
    * <The other force is sent by the Andalite Electorate,> Ax says sadly.  <They do not believe that the rebel yeerks want only to live here in peace.  They are coming to annihilate this planet if they can.>
    * “And that’s why we need you to believe us.”  Jake steps forward again.  “Why we need to borrow the body of anyone willing to be borrowed, why we need soldiers and morphers and hosts.  So if you want to protect your planet…”  He takes a breath, lets it sink in before he says it.  “Find your local Sharing chapter.  Offer them everything you can.  They’ll get you in touch with the people who need you most.  This is Jake Berenson, on behalf of the human species, asking you all to go join the Sharing.”



**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Repbloggable post is [ here.](http://thejakeformerlyknownasprince.tumblr.com/post/172015609114/i-just-read-the-tocsin-thanks-to-you-mentioning)


	18. What if Tobias was stuck as a human in #33?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An anon said: what do you reckon would have happened if tobias had run out of time at the dance in #33 and become re-trapped as a human?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Picks up during the opening scene of #33, where Rachel tries to pressure Tobias into staying at their school dance long enough to stay human forever, because of a bulletin board in a school hallway pointing out that most raptors live less than 30 years in the wild. 
> 
> Additional warnings for this chapter for homophobia (including internalized homophobia), suicidal ideation, and unhealthy relationship dynamics.

  * It’s Jake who finds him out there.  Jake, who stepped out of the dance to get away from the people, the noise, the  _high school_ -ness of it all.  Jake who sprints across the field, drops to his knees, slides across the grass and nearly collides with Tobias like a runner coming into home.  Jake who has already figured out what’s happening, Jake who feels a horrible helpless sense of déjà vu as he finds himself saying “C’mon, Tobias.  Concentrate.  Morph back.  You can do this.  You can do this, man.  It’s safe, we’re okay.  Just focus.  Just stay calm and morph back—”
    * Only Tobias isn’t calm, and he’s not changing.  He’s breathing in these horrible whooping gasps, frame shaking, rocking in place.  Jake doesn’t know how long he’s been like this, how long it’s already been too late.
    * Rachel comes running out of the building a second later, and Jake looks up in time to catch the expression on her face as she, too, recognizes what’s happening.  Many times in the coming weeks, Jake will try to forget that moment, that look.  Because it tells him more in an instant than he ever, ever wanted to know about his cousin.  “Get Cassie,” Jake tells her, voice harsher than he means it to be. “Go now.”  And then he turns back to Tobias, implicitly dismissing her.
    * Jake is hopeless at keeping track of time; he’s not sure whether it’s been seconds or hours before he stops trying to tell Tobias what to do and starts just trying to calm him down.  He does know that he’s seen Cassie work miracles—Marco and the flea morph, all of them as wolves—but that by the time she drops to the ground in front of Tobias they’re already too late for a miracle.  She helps all the same, both of them working together to bring his breathing from blind panic to pained exhaustion.  Jake registers dimly that Marco is providing a distraction near the door to keep anyone else leaving the school from coming this way, that Ax has demorphed and remorphed and now stands watching them with an expression that is grimness edging into nausea.  It should be Rachel holding Tobias close, shaking with his tremors, desperately wondering how this could have been prevented.  But Jake’s the one who’s here, and he’s not about to let Tobias go so that he can go find her.
  * Tobias ends up going home with Marco that night.  Letting him camp with Jake is out of the question—Chapman and Visser Three at least and half the Yeerk Empire at most know that he’s Elfangor’s kid, so they can’t let Tom connect him to Jake—and Cassie admits there’s no way her parents would let her have a boy spend the night.  The person whose company Tobias wants the most is Ax, but there are bobcats and wolves in the woods behind Cassie’s house that pose too great a risk to a helpless little human.  Rachel offers her own place and there’s a hideously awkward moment of silence during which Tobias finds himself unable to look at her.  Marco throws an arm around his shoulders, cheerfully announces that his dad won’t even notice, and even throws a lascivious wink and a promise to “keep him warm” at Rachel.
  * When they assemble in her barn the next day, Cassie thinks that it might be the most adult conversation they’ve ever had.  Which is saying something.
    * “I’m not going into foster care,” Tobias says flatly.  “And just so we’re clear, that’s what we’d be talking about.  My mom’s list of surviving relatives is not that long, my dad’s is…”  He glances at Ax and attempts a smile.  “Not exactly on record anywhere.  Living with my uncle was my last shot, and I once again proved to be more trouble than I was worth.”
    * Jake clears his throat.  “My parents—”
    * “Are great,” Marco says.  “Really.  But they’ve got two kids already and they’re not just going to adopt a third with no questions asked.”
    * There’s something lurking there, Cassie thinks, something about how much Jake’s family did for Marco after his mom died.  She also knows that Marco would rather stab himself in the eye with a rusty pitchfork than acknowledge it openly.
    * “I asked my mom.”  There’s a rustle of paper, and Rachel pulls out an entire folder from her backpack.  “Turns out, you can become an emancipated minor in California with a job, a place to live, and a guardian’s permission, provided you can prove you’re capable of taking care of yourself and staying in school.”  She flips another sheet.  It’s a computer print-out, judging by the rows of perforated holes along both long edges.  “I, uh, raided my mom’s home office once I knew where to start.  This is a list of local judges who hear that kind of case, along with my mom’s notes on all their personalities and preferences.  I also printed off everything I could find on how this process usually works.”
    * Cassie feels a touch of surprise, cold on her skin, almost like dread.  It has to have taken Rachel hours of careful work to get all this information.  So much effort in so little time all but confirms the worst suspicion Cassie dares not give voice.  Something happened between those two, last night at the dance.  Something was said, or maybe left unsaid, something important.  
    * “Cassie?” Jake says, drawing her back in.  “Morphing human so one of us can pose as his guardian.  Is it worth it?”
    * “I…” She clears her throat, looks from him to Tobias and back.  “I don’t know anymore,” she says sadly.  “It’s all so complicated these days, isn’t it?”
  * Cassie doesn’t hear the conversation that ensues after all the others have left, because by then Rachel and Tobias are the only ones left in her yard, but she could probably guess at its gist if she tried.
    * “Would you just  _talk_  to me?” Rachel demands, when Tobias starts to turn away.  As always, she finds herself getting angry when she doesn’t know how else to react.
    * Tobias turns back around, shoulders hunched defensively.  Amazing how he can still flare without any feathers.  It takes him a moment to work up the courage to ask, but at long last he does.  “Did you do it on purpose?  Trap me in morph, that is.”
    * Rachel crosses her arms.  “Did you?”
    * He rocks back a step, mouth popping halfway open, and for a second Rachel thinks (bitterly) that she’s won.  But when he speaks, his voice is as hard with anger as she’s ever heard it.  “If I had, that would be  _my_  choice.”  He presses a fist against his chest.  “ _My_  decision to make, with  _my_  body.  Not yours.  Never yours.”
    * “I didn’t mean—” Rachel says, and then stops.  She doesn’t know how that sentence ends.  She didn’t mean  _anything_.  She was just acting on impulse, the way she always does.  “I was just…”
    * Tobias blows out a long breath, fighting tears now.  “I love you,” he says at last.  “But I need some time, here.  I don’t know if I’m ever gonna be able to trust you again, and that’s…”  He swallows wetly.  “That hurts like hell.”  She starts forward, and he holds up both hands to fend her off.  “Maybe someday,” he says.  “But not soon.”
    * “But how—”  Rachel coughs when her voice wavers.  “Our next mission—”
    * “ _Don’t you get it?_ ” Tobias shouts.  Tobias.  Shouting.  It’s incomprehensible. “There is no next mission for me!  I’m out.  I’m done.”  He sucks a breath.  “And if something happens to you, or Ax, or Cassie or Marco, because I’m not there to watch your backs—” His voice cracks.  Without another word, he turns around and walks away.
  * Tobias walks for a long time, the dress shoes left over from the dance last night and the jacket he borrowed from Jake (Lakers #8) providing sparse protection.  He gets lost twice, but he knows these woods well enough to orient himself both times, and eventually he finds it by the soft blue glow of the television set against the grey twilight.
    * <Tobias.>  Ax stands up quickly, clearly not having expected him.
    * “I, uh.”  Tobias stuffs both hands in his jacket pockets, discovers the hard way that Jake forgot a piece of gum in one.  “I couldn’t leave you out here all alone, could I?”
    * <I would miss you terribly if you did,> Ax says with his usual knack for bluntness.  <Come, sit.   _Days of Our Lives_  is reaching a point in the narrative marked by increased use of violin music, which means that These Messages are about to start.>
  * The next day, after assuring all of his friends that he was not, in fact, eaten by a bobcat (wondering all the while if they were this worried when he disappeared as a hawk), Tobias starts to try and figure out where he can live.  He’s still a fan of just moving in with Ax—who already has a mini generator for his TV, as he points out, and could easily hook up a space heater and a hot plate too—but even Tobias can admit that the idea wouldn’t be feasible long-term.  Which means they’re back to Rachel’s idea of doing this above-board and legally.
    * So they go: Jake and Cassie as squirrels to sneak through their school’s air vents to steal Tobias’s file from the record room, Rachel and Ax to shake down Mr. DeGroot’s office for everything they can find on Tobias and on Alan Fangor.  Tobias, meanwhile, walks straight into Chapman’s office and announces that he’d like to enroll in classes, please.
    * Marco, half-morphed into the office worker he acquired during that whole Visser One debacle (which means he has a distinct limp from where one leg turned out longer than the other and two different-colored eyes but at least a reasonably ordinary adult human appearance) poses as the leader of a youth shelter downtown.  He explains cheerfully that he’d like this-here teen runaway to become all proper-like and legal with a little good old educatin’.
    * Inwardly, Tobias is cringing at Marco’s so-called acting.  Outwardly, however, all he has to do is sit and stare at the wall in sullen silence, which isn’t hard to do.
    * Chapman, who of course knows that Tobias isn’t exactly an ordinary human teenager—who knows he’s not entirely human, period—spends way too long for their comfort peering at Marco in suspicion.  But in the end he accepts their story and, sighing, digs out the necessary paperwork to enroll a new student in the ninth grade.
  * When it happens, Tobias almost misses it.  They’re sitting in Cassie’s barn, papers spread over every surface around them, going through file after file; Ax and Rachel had to steal several whole drawers’ worth of records to disguise the real purpose of their expedition.  And then Jake goes, “huh.”
    * “Social Security Number?” Marco asks.  None of them are quite sure what a Social Security Number is, what one does, or even what one would look like if they found it, but they’re also pretty sure that they’re going to need Tobias’s sooner rather than later.
    * “No, I just…” Jake glances up at Tobias.  “I just assumed your mom was dead, since you never talk about her or anything.  I didn’t realize she was right here in town.”
    * “Wow,” Rachel snaps.  “Invasion of privacy much?”
    * Jake looks back down at the sheet he’s holding, face flushed.  “Yeah, sorry.  My bad.”
    * “Anyway, I found some housing for Cal Poly students that might be cheap enough,” Cassie says, trying to move them away from the awkward moment.
    * Tobias feels right now the way he did when dive-bombed by a peregrine falcon: as if he has been blindsided, body-slammed, knocked off course and off kilter, unable to find the horizon enough to pull out of this freefall.  “Wait, what?” he hears himself say.  “What about my mom?”
  * Twelve hours later, Tobias finds himself standing on a doorstep eight blocks (eight  _freaking_  blocks) from his uncle’s place, literally bouncing up and down with nervous tension.  Marco is once again in his social worker disguise (since apparently the fictional Mr. Eugene Thompson has acquired an MSW now, and if Marco doesn’t learn to keep his story straight then Tobias is going to strangle him), this time with the wide thighs and beer gut and bald patch of a quinquagenarian on his own four-foot-eleven adolescent frame.  Ax is in there, too, in his usual human morph, weak cover story about being a youth counseling intern in place.  Really, though, he’s there because Tobias needs him there.  It’s as simple as that.
    * “This is a bad idea, isn’t it?”  Tobias reaches up to fix his hair, drops his hand before he can make a mess of it, finds himself straightening the hem of his shirt instead.
    * “Probably,” Marco says cheerfully.  “I mean, we do all remember what happened the last time a long-lost relative of yours popped out of the woodwork.  We do remember that, right?”
    * “If this one is also a controller, we will be here to protect you,” Ax tells Tobias solemnly.
    * “Good news.”  Tobias smiles, but he can still hear the bitterness in his own voice.  “This one doesn’t want to adopt me.  In fact, this one doesn’t want me at all.”
    * There’s a nasty silence that follows.  Ax breaks it.  “She felt unqualified to care for an infant.  You are now nearly an adult by human standards, and capable of self-sufficiency.”
    * Tobias straightens his shirt hem again.  Pushes his hair off his face.  Puts his hands in his pockets and pulls them out again.  Preening, in human form.
    * “Up to you, man.”  Marco looks over.  “We can still walk away—”
    * Which is when the front door opens.  “You do know that ding-dong-ditch doesn’t actually work unless you move quickly, right?” the woman on the other side says.  Her voice is light, almost teasing, but the impression of near-harmlessness from her tone and the blankness of her eyes disappears as soon as Tobias registers that her left hand rests lightly ( _very_ lightly) on the collar of a large and pissed-off German Shepherd, and that her right has a comfortable grip on the handle of a metal baseball bat.
    * Marco, who clearly also realizes that they’re a few wrong words away from having their brains bashed out and then licked off the floor by a service dog, launches into his best politician voice.  “Good morning, ma’am, and let me say it is a pleasure to meet you.”  He holds out one of his carefully-crafted business cards, blanches as he registers the uselessness of this gesture, and stuffs it back into his pocket.  “My name is Eugene Thompson, and I was hoping to introduce you to—”
    * “Been there, done that.”  Loren’s tone echoes Tobias’s for bitter-edged amusement.  “God did not, it would seem, see fit to to bring back my memories, my balance, or my stunning good looks.  Guess he’s not a laser-guided opthamologist after all.”
    * “Aunt Lydia said you were gone,” Tobias blurts out.  “She said you ran off and probably got yourself killed and Uncle George didn’t talk about you at all and this whole time you—You—”
    * The bat slips out of Loren’s hand and hits the floor with a  _clang_.  “Tobias?” she whispers.
    * “Yeah,” he whispers, voice thickening.  “Yeah, it’s me.”
  * Ax watches Loren with no small amount of fascination as she brings them into her home (smaller than Cassie’s or Jake’s, larger than Marco’s), directs them to sit, and perches on the edge of a coffee table across from them.  This odd little alien, with her asymmetrical features and skilled hands—which prepare and pass out four mugs of tea without hesitation—is the reason his brother abandoned a war and his entire species (abandoned his family) to make what he thought was a permanent move to planet Earth.  She and Tobias sit as mirrors across from one another, shoulders hunched, heads tilted, strands of dirty-blond hair falling across soft grey eyes.  Ax finds he wants to subtract out those resemblances, seeking what remains: Does Tobias’s pointed chin come from Elfangor’s human shape?  What about those round cheeks, or his long-fingered hands?
    * “This is a very nice beverage,” Ax slips into a pause in the conversation.  “Bevvvvv-rage.  So bitter, but so warm.  Ingenious.”
    * Loren laughs.  “Glad you like it.  You know, you remind me of…”  She trails off, frowning.  Ax and Tobias and Marco wait in breath-held silence, but after a second she shakes her head, flapping a hand in dismissal.  “Sorry, it’s not going to come to me.  All I get are little flashes of recognition, never know where they come from.  You probably have the same inflection as my tenth-grade English teacher, something like that.”
    * The conversation moves on, almost like nothing happened.  Tobias is telling Loren about the part-time job he got at the bookstore downtown in an effort to reassure her that they can make this work (“Oh yes, this boy is plenty good at feeding himself,” Marco throws in) and she’s clearly warming to the idea.  So it’s only reluctantly that Ax interrupts to say, “Tobias, it has been one of your hours and fifty-seven of your minutes.”
    * Loren pauses long enough to toss out a casual “So demorph if you’re almost out of time, dear,” before she goes back to saying, “And although Champ’s been a blessing, I don’t think I could say no to an extra pair of hands.  I do want this to work, kiddo.”
    * “De _morph_?” Marco’s voice rises into a squeak.
    * Loren draws up, blinking several times in surprise.  In that regard at least she is a polar opposite of Tobias: unrestrainedly expressive, emotions written all over her face.  “Wow, check out the crazy lady,” she says with a laugh.  “Talking nonsense again.  You know, half the memory fragments still floating around in here—” A rueful tap to the side of her head— “don’t even line up to reality.  And sometimes the insanity just... slips out.”
    * “None of this ‘crazy’ has to do with blue-furred extraterrestrials, does it?” Tobias asks, tone wary.
    * They are all able to see the moment of shock and revelation spread across her face.
    * “Please,” Ax says, “Place your hand on my arm.  You will feel something strange, and a little frightening.  Tenning.  But I believe it may explain many things.”
    * The next several hours’ worth of conversation prove to be, Ax can tell, very strange and very frustrating for Loren.  Most painful for her are the moments when, for instance, Marco starts to say, “Visser Three’s an andalite-controller—” and Loren finishes with “So he’s still using Alloran’s body, then?” only to admit, after a few seconds of silence, that she has no idea who Alloran is or how she knew that name.  Most painful for Ax is when she accepts the news of Elfangor’s death with a casual nod and a motion for Tobias to keep talking.  Still, at the end of the day, Ax and Marco depart—and leave Tobias with her.
  * It’s not perfect.  Far from.  Their high school’s crop of bullies ends up needing to be fended off one by one with Tobias’s dead-cold predator’s stare before they leave him alone.  He’s ragingly, irrationally jealous of Champ any time Loren displays easy affection with her dog.  Loren loses her temper and shouts at Tobias after he (not knowing any better) shoves some of the furniture out of alignment, and for a minute she sounds so much like her older sister that he finds himself shaking, even her hasty apology not enough to calm the racing of his heart.  Planning and carrying out an excursion to the hork-bajir valley proves to be a four-day process, dangerously close to being more trouble than it’s worth.  Tobias gets stress headaches from squinting constantly into a distance too far away for human eyes to perceive properly.  He feels suffocatingly, relentlessly glued to the floor, a rat skittering around a maze of two dimensions inside a clumsy half-muffled body with too many limbs and not enough weapons.  He and Rachel have stifling half-conversations in the halls between classes.
    * It’s another Tuesday.  He’s angry and impotent after listening to another desperate account of another desperate mission where he could do nothing. (There was an Anti-Morphing Ray.  Cassie and Rachel destroyed it.  Everyone’s pretty sure that doing so only aroused the yeerks’ suspicion and desire to build a new one.)  Tobias kicks off his bike at the top of the tallest hill in their city.  And then he closes his eyes.  And then he lifts both hands off the handlebars.
    * It feels like flying, almost, for the fifteen seconds that it lasts.  The crash, when it comes, is like slamming into the ground at terminal velocity after a misjudged dive.  For an instant after the initial impact he finds himself scrambling, flapping, trying to get off the ground before some opportunistic golden eagle or rattlesnake can see—and then he realizes, as if for the first time, that he’s never flying again.  He stares dully at the wrist he threw out on instinct to arrest his fall, which is even now swelling out to twice its natural size.  Six weeks, he thinks, oddly detached.  It takes six weeks for bones to heal, when you’re an earthbound little human.  That, and: it could have been his neck, not his wrist, if he’d fallen wrong.  (Could have, could have been.  Could have.  So close.)
    * There’s no use sitting around feeling sorry for himself.  He hobbles painfully to his feet, arm tucked close to his side.  He’s ready to go home.  Ready to face the disappointment and worry that Loren doesn’t know how to hide.  Ready to face the clinic bill they won’t know how to pay.  Ready, now, to keep moving.
  * Later, Tobias will blame it all on the L.A. Dodgers.  That’s how it starts: Marco comes by two or three nights a week to catch the Dodgers game on the radio with Loren (mostly, Tobias suspects, because Marco’s trying to avoid Nora and they’re all in the habit of avoiding Tom, so Tobias’s house is the only good place to do so) and often stays long enough to cook them all dinner.  He proves to be good at pulling together meals on a budget, and even better at making Loren laugh with his wry commentary as they lean close to the radio.
    * Then again, maybe it starts with Algebra.  Because Marco’s the one who ends up doing most of the work of catching Tobias up on a year and a half of missed education.  (Jake manages to be even further behind than Tobias, Cassie has the unfortunate tendency to ask Tobias how he’s  _doing_  in a voice that makes him want to punch someone, and Rachel is out of the question.)  That’s why they spend so many afternoons together with textbooks spread over a table in the library or Loren’s kitchen, heads bent close, arguing companionably about factorials and integers.  Ax joins them sometimes, and so does Jake, but most often it’s just the two of them.
    * Then again, maybe the sweet tea is to blame.  Because they’re drinking it, both of them sipping from the same sweating-cold jam jar, on the day it happens, and Tobias could swear he tastes the bitter-edged sugar inside Marco’s mouth when it does.
    * Because however it starts, this is how it ends: with Tobias feeling like it’s the most inevitable thing that’s ever happened when, on the trailing edge of an exasperated sigh of laughter, Marco’s mouth comes up and captures Tobias’s in a kiss.  When Tobias opens his mouth, a noise of surprised happiness caught there, and slides his tongue forward against Marco’s.  When Marco pulls him forward—and Tobias recoils.
    * Tobias jerks to his feet so sharply that the jar of tea tips over, spraying a sticky splatter across textbooks and notes before arcing to the floor to smash on the linoleum.  Tobias gasps out a curse, already scrambling for dish towel and broom and mop.  Because Loren hates mess.  No, it’s more than that.  Mess is dangerous, liable to result in falls or injuries, liable to prevent Champ from doing his job if Loren needs help.  Tobias refuses to consider the possibility that he’s thinking about tea to avoid thinking about anything else, especially not after he hears the front door slam and realizes Marco just left without either one of them saying a word about— About—
  * The following afternoon, Ax finds himself participating in one of the more confusing conversations he’s had since first coming to Earth.  Tobias describes, briefly, the experience of engaging in a certain degree of saliva exchange with Marco, clarifies (unnecessarily; Ax has seen plenty of soap operas) that this is a form of human mating display, and then goes on to express concern and even distress about what this could possibly “mean” for himself, Marco, and the future.
    * <It seems to me,> Ax says cautiously, <as though you wish to date Marco.  And as though he has interest in dating you.  Correct?>
    * Tobias, who has been pacing as he talks in a manner that speaks to discomfort with the restrictions of a human body, turns to look at Ax.  “I can’t just— _date_  him.”
    * Ax is pretty sure he’s missed something.  <Why not?>
    * “He’s a  _boy_.”
    * <I know.>
    * “And  _I’m_  a boy.”
    * <Yes, you are.>
    * Tobias stares at Ax, clearly trying to find words.  Ax waits.  He knows that many human concepts are mysterious and defy explanation; this appears to be one of them.  “It’s not natural,” Tobias says at last.
    * <I agree, dating is silly and artificial,> Ax says.  <But it does allow one to test potential mates before—>
    * “That’s just it, though.  Two guys together.  As in,  _together_.  That’s…  That’s not okay, man.”
    * Ax turns this sentence over in his mind several times before he finally gives up.  <I don’t understand,> he admits at last.
    * “Two people, same gender.  In a romantic relationship.”  Tobias is clearly trying very hard to make what feels like an important point; Ax feels bad for being so lost.  “Do andalites even have a word for that?”
    * <Ah!> For the first time, Ax feels a glimmer of comprehension.  <This is because you want biological offspring!  It’s true, mates of the same sex, even among andalites, must adopt if they wish to raise young.  The term is  _iotith_ , when a couple has no way to produce biological children.>
    * Tobias stares at him, face blank.  “People like that are allowed to raise kids?”
    * Ax is pretty sure they’ve gotten off track from the point about whether or not Tobias should date Marco.  <People like what?>
    * In response, Tobias says several words, most of which Ax has to look up later using an online encyclopedia.  When he does, he will regret having done so.  Tobias, when later questioned, will admit to having learned most of them from his aunt.
    * “…but I’m  _not_ ,” Tobias says now, before Ax can ask for clarification.  “Me and Rachel, that was real.”  His expression is pleading.  “I know we’re not together anymore, but that wasn’t me faking or being confused.  It  _wasn’t_.  I would’ve married her, once upon a time.  And now…”  He spins around again, as if asking the trees for answers.  “Maybe that’s it.  Maybe I just got confused ‘cause Marco’s so feminine, with all that hair and those  _lips_  and those  _cheekbones_  and those  _eyelashes_ …”  Tobias sighs, still staring into middle distance.  “I mean, have you seen his eyelashes?”
    * <They are very symmetrical,> Ax agrees.  <Aesthetically pleasing, by human standards.  You should buy him flowers.  On  _The Young and the Restless_ , interested humans frequently buy one another flowers before courtship rituals.>
    * “Maybe this is because I’m part andalite,” Tobias is saying, mostly to himself.  “You said andalites just kinda pair off, regardless of gender?”
    * <Not all matings have to be pairs,> Ax says.  <But they are driven by emotional compatibility, not by concern with procreation, yes.>
    * “Maybe I’m not gay, then.”  Tobias sounds hopeful.  “And maybe Marco’s just…  _Marco_ , and I want to kiss him because…”  He shakes his head.  “I can’t date Marco.  What would people say?”
    * <Nothing,> Ax points out, <if you didn’t tell them.>
    * Tobias stares at him for a few more seconds, and then he laughs.  “You’re nuts, man.  I love you and all, but you’re completely bonkers.  You know that, right?”
  * Still deeply baffled by it all the following day, Ax ends up calling Marco’s house.  “Marco,” he says into the pay phone.  “Arrrc-co.  I spoke with Tobias yesterday, and—”
    * “Oh sweet baby Jesus, he’s having some big gay freak-out all over you, isn’t he?”  Marco sighs loudly.
    * “Um.”  Ax isn’t sure what most of those words mean in context.
    * “Tell him that I figured out I was bisexual—you know how to spell that, ‘bisexual’?—when I was ten years old, and that I can explain the concept to him using small words.  And tell him to call me himself, would you?  One way or another this fine ass isn’t gonna stay single for long, and if it’s not him then it’ll be someone else.”
    * Ax does, in fact, pass the message along.  He’s not sure what happens in the interim, but when he sees them again, Marco and Tobias are holding hands where they stand on Loren’s narrow slice of front lawn together.  They lean close and kiss before they part, leaving Tobias blushing furiously while Marco saunters away, grinning like a loon.
  * Tobias thinks they’re being good about hiding.  Sure, Loren’s probably figured it out by now, given that her hearing is better than most and her house is not that large.  (If she knows she doesn’t seem to mind that Marco’s a boy, which is a whole other concept Tobias still struggles to wrap his mind around.)  But Tobias always makes sure that he and Marco straighten their clothes and hide any hickies before they go anywhere that someone might see them, and any time they’re around anyone other than Ax they don’t touch each other at all.  So far the secret is holding.
    * The truth is, though, that Tobias isn’t sure he could give this up even at the expense of the whole world knowing he’s dating a boy.  It’s the first thing that makes him feel like he  _fits_ inside a human skin, the first reason ever to find himself grateful for a human body.  Surely these blunt little teeth serve no other purpose than to suck at the skin of Marco’s collarbone until he’s incoherent with babbling out his pleasure.  Surely five-fingered hands were invented for the sole reason of tangling in the silk of that rich, dark hair.  Surely every nerve in this body came into being just to be touched by Marco’s tongue and fingertips.
    * Tobias finds other experiences as well, under the covers when he’s alone at night, that lead him to believe every bird on the planet is missing out.
  * He thinks they’re being subtle, until the day Rachel pushes shut his locker door with one manicured nail and says, “Just to be clear… Of all the guys in all the gin joints in all the world, you picked the one who laughs at his own dumb blond jokes while waiting around to be executed by Visser Three?   _Seriously_ , dude?   _Marco_?”
    * Tobias fights down the tension tightening his shoulders (if he had feathers, they’d be flared out around him) when he realizes that her tone is teasing, her smile unforced and even edged with laughter.  “Ax told you?” he says.
    * “Cassie figured it out all on her own, then she spilled the beans to Jake and me,” Rachel explains.  “You, me, mall, four-thirty.  We shop, we get tacos, you tell me all about how you managed to go this crazy.”
    * “I am not spending all my hard-earned money on designer jeans,” Tobias says.
    * “Good, I’ll buy them for you.  I own too many clothes already, and it’s not like you can keep wearing Jake’s hand-me-downs forever.”
    * Tobias ducks his head, smiling.  “Yeah, well, my options are limited.  Marco and Cassie are tiny people, Ax owns thirteen socks and zero pairs of underwear, and I’m pretty sure I couldn’t pull off any of your mini-skirts with legs like these.”
    * “All the more reason for me to shop for you.  I’m told that buying Cassie clothes she never wears is ‘wasteful,’ so I’m short a victim to use as my personal Barbie doll.”
    * “Rachel…”
    * “It’s almost Christmas?”
    * “It’s October.  And you’re Jewish, and I’m—I’ve recently learned—descended from a combination of agnostic hippies and tree-worshipping wingnuts.”
    * “I won’t tell Ax about the ‘wingnut’ comment if and only if you at the very least agree to try a few things on?”
    * Tobias sighs, but he’s smiling more now, both of them on the edge of laughter.  “It’s a deal.”
  * Not only is it not awkward, but it proves to be a lot of fun to spend the afternoon hanging out.  They do, in fact, gossip about boys (Rachel admits that she has no room to be judging anyone else’s poor taste, and then launches into a description of her half-a-date with some guy named T.T. that leaves Tobias almost crying with laughter), and Rachel goes a long way toward saving him from what she describes as her cousin’s “unforgivable insult to all reasonable standards of taste and color-coordination.”  Tobias never realized they could be friends like this, that it could be so easy.  And yet he-and-Marco ( _whatever_  they are) seems to have settled a thousand old uncertainties between him and Rachel.  He loves her still, of course he does, but as a friend.  It’s less intense and proportionately more comfortable than what they had before.
    * Which is why, as they sit in the food court amidst bulging Express bags, he tells her before anyone else.  “I got another offer to join the Sharing yesterday.”  He laughs nervously.  “And this time I said yes.”
    * Rachel chokes on a mouthful of her smoothie, inhaling pureed fruit until she nearly gags up a lung.  “Are you  _high_?” she demands, once she’s regained the powers of speech.
    * Tobias lowers his voice.  “I talked to Mr. Tidwell, and he said that there are plenty of Peace Movement yeerks in need of hosts.  If I did this, it’d be somebody I vetted, somebody I agreed to and negotiated with in advance, so that—”
    * “You can  _become a voluntary controller_?”  Rachel speaks too loudly.  She glances around, but no one seems to have noticed.
    * “The invasion’s not going away,” Tobias says.  “And I can’t hide from it by staying home.  The yeerks have at least twenty percent of our high school already, and they’re using your cousin as the poster boy to recruit the other eighty.”
    * Rachel’s jaw tightens and Tobias changes tacks.  He knew that bringing up Tom was a low blow, and he did it anyway.
    * “Hey, maybe my mom will get lucky and they’ll just shoot her in the head when they do the final sweeps,” he says, falsely bright.  “As for the rest of us…”  He shrugs.  
    * “If you can’t beat them, join them?” Rachel smiles, but there’s no mistaking the anger in her tone.
    * “I’m not waiting around for them to take me.  I’m going to fight back however I can, and right now infiltration is my best option.”
    * “You know Jake still gets nightmares, right?”  Rachel leans in close.  “You were there when he told us.  And that was three days.  You’d be signing up for months.  Years.  You’re worth too much for this, Tobias.  You are so much more to m— to all of us, than some host body.”
    * Tobias is touched by the realization that she’s angry on his behalf, but he doesn’t back down.  “According to Mr. Tidwell, Illim is mostly just along for the ride.  So it wouldn’t be like that.  I’d still be in control.  I’d still be me.”
    * Rachel stares at him for another minute.  Then she drains her smoothie in a long gulp, slams the cup down, and says, “How can I help?”
    * “Really?”
    * “If you’re gonna do this—”  She points a finger at him. “—then you are not doing it alone.  But just so you know?  Jake’s gonna blow a gasket when we tell him, and that’s going to be  _nothing_  on how Marco will react.”
    * “You really mean it, though?”  Tobias isn’t even sure why he’s asking.
    * “C’mon.”  Rachel laughs.  “What’s family for?”



**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Rebloggable post [ here](http://thejakeformerlyknownasprince.tumblr.com/post/167704549709/what-do-you-reckon-would-have-happened-if-tobias).


	19. What if all the yeerks suddenly died?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Anonymous asked: Idea: What if, partway through the war, all the yeerks (on Earth) died? Not killed by the Animorphs-- maybe the Andalites got their act together, maybe they were wiped out by an unexpected plague, whatever. But suddenly, the teen soldiers find their enemies just... gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Picks up between #19 and #20.
> 
> Additional warnings this chapter for implied character death, mentions of post-traumatic stress, and implied child neglect.

  * Embarrassingly enough, it takes them almost two weeks to notice.  Well, that’s not quite true.  They notice the suspicious lack of yeerk activity in less than a week, but mostly in the form of Marco declaring it to be “quiet… _too_ quiet” and Jake wondering what the heck has the yeerk inside Tom acting so morose all of a sudden.  It takes almost two weeks of Tobias lurking over known Yeerk Pool entrances speculating about where the heck the controllers are, two weeks of Ax mentioning that the internet chatter is more full of yeerk talk than usual, two weeks of Erek reporting no Sharing meetings anywhere in the country, and two weeks of Cassie telling them to appreciate the break for a change… and then Rachel snaps.
    * Specifically, she gets fed up with the tension, marches up to Tom in the middle of a school hallway, and (poking him in the chest every so often for emphasis) demands to know whether the entire Yeerk Empire has suddenly gone into hibernation or— or  _what_.
    * Tom’s response is to grab her by the arm and drag her into Chapman’s office.
    * Rachel fights him with literal teeth and literal nails, of course — right up until the moment Tom turns to Chapman and goes “See?  She remembers that there were brain-stealing aliens too.  That proves I’m not crazy.”
    * Rachel stares at Tom in shock.
    * Chapman heaves a put-upon sigh and says, “I never said you were crazy.  I  _said_  that we should all probably forget it ever happened and move on, because  _if_  we told anyone  _then_  we’d appear to be crazy.”
    * “But…”  Tom frowns, petulant.  “But if we, like, got a reporter to talk about the yeerks, and enough of us agreed about what happened…”
    * “Then no doubt the school district would send gas inspectors out to determine why so many people in this town are hallucinating,” Chapman drawls.  “The yeerks are all dead, their bodies entirely decomposed in the Earth atmosphere by now.  The nonhuman hosts were last seen wandering off in search of that mystical colony of free hork-bajir somewhere in the mountains.  I don’t have a way to contact the andalites.  All of which means that the only proof you have is a rapidly-evaporating puddle of kandrona under the school.”  He sighs.  “Any reporter with an ounce of sense will blame the fumes from that for the gas leak, and we’re back to square one.”
    * “The yeerks… are dead?” Rachel asks.
    * “How did you not already know this, if you were a controller?” Tom says.
    * She should probably wait and confirm this with Jake and the others.  Probably.  But then, she’s never been very good at waiting.  “Because I’m one of the morphers who’s been fighting them.”
  * After all that, Rachel doesn’t even get to tell the others the news.  Because she bursts into their meeting only to find that Toby is already standing there looking grave, and Cassie’s mouth is hanging open.  By the time Toby is done telling her story — and answering all 500 of Marco’s suspicious questions — most of the details come out.
    * A few days ago, close to a thousand hork-bajir and taxxons had simply wandered into the free hork-bajir valley.  Toby had assumed an attack, until one of the taxxons, who gave the unusual-for-a-taxxon name of Arbron, had explained that none of them were controllers.  Because, to the best of anyone’s knowledge, all the yeerks simply dropped dead a few days back.  
    * Toby, not being born yesterday, had forced the entire cavalcade to wait three days under constant guard before letting them into the valley. They passed.  All signs point to the conclusion that they’re telling the truth: the yeerks inside them all have died without warning.
  * Marco, being Marco, maintains that this is all some elaborate yeerk conspiracy.  Until Rachel shamefacedly mentions that she blurted the whole thing out to Tom.  Until Tom, muttering about their questionable taste in tourist destinations, takes them through a Yeerk Pool entrance under the car wash and shows them the cavern: empty, echoing, deserted.  Filled with detritus and congealing kandrona and abandoned junk.
  * Cassie becomes the one to voice the question that’s been on all their minds, later that afternoon as they sit around her barn.  “So…” she says slowly.  “Now what?”
    * “We’ve gotta tell someone, right?”  Rachel looks around at them.  “Just pick any adult, show them that we can morph, and then…”
    * <And then come the conspiracy theorists,> Tobias points out.  <Then come the social workers.  Then come the paparazzi.  Is that really what we want?>
    * <Prince Jake?  What do you recommend?>
    * Jake runs his hands through his hair.  “Honestly?  I want to go home.  I want to finish my stupid English essay, since I guess I’ve got time for it now.  I want to go to the UCSB game on Saturday.  I want to…”  He takes a breath.  “To catch up with my brother.  Maybe even get some sleep for once, while I’m at it.”
    * They vote on it, for lack of a better solution.  Rachel and Marco are all for telling the world.  Cassie thinks they should wait on a decision until they talk to Toby and some of the ex-hosts about what everyone else wants.  Tobias and Jake seem exhausted even by the thought of the media circus that would ensue.  Ax, as always, abstains.
    * “Okay,” Jake says.  “I guess that’s two votes in favor of sharing our story, three against.  We’ll go with Cassie’s suggestion: hold off for now, revisit the idea after talking to the others.”
  * Things get back to normal.  Kind of.  Sure.
    * Rachel punches a girl she doesn’t even know in the face after said girl rudely ignores Marco.  And then, when Marco makes a breathy comment about Rachel defending his honor, she punches him too.  Detention is a relief; it’s high time someone punished her.
    * Cassie breaks down crying in the middle of dinner for, really, no reason at all.  She finds herself crying harder when her parents hover and worry and offer explanations: it’s about a boy, it’s about the goose last week they couldn’t save, it’s about hormones.
    * Tobias wavers.  He practices, a little bit at a time.  Pretends to be human long enough to walk downtown.  Grows fingers and dull eyes to see what happens when he rings Rachel’s doorbell like any other boy on the planet.  Each time he goes back.  Each time giving up human shape feels more like disappointment, more like relief.
    * Jake wanders the house in restless circles for six or more hours a night, trying to wear himself out so that the nightmares won’t wake him yet again.  Sometimes he hears the crisp  _pock-pock-pock_  of a basketball on concrete outside, and feels less alone.
    * Marco’s dad comments on how many evenings they’ve spent together with a reheated pizza and the latest Madden.  Marco brushes it off with a comment about earning enough brownie points to get a car.
    * Ax, with a little help from some commandeered yeerk tech, calls home again.  He tries to tell his parents everything that happened, and finds he doesn’t have the words.  They assure him they’re coming for him the moment they get permission from the Electorate, and he tries to believe that that time is coming soon.
  * Ten days later, when it seems that every single trace of yeerk activity really has disappeared for good, a kid with messy blond hair and soft grey eyes walks into their high school to enroll.  There are some inconsistencies in his paperwork, of course — he lists his uncle as his legal guardian in spite of said uncle being less than a year older than him, he gives his home address as a P.O. box downtown, he has no transcripts from previous schools — but the vice principal proves willing to overlook all of those issues in light of everything that this kid has done to keep the planet safe.  Chapman even signs off on the form claiming that Tobias requires access to a private bathroom once every two hours all day long for unspecified medical needs.  It feels, in some ways, like the first true commitment to the idea that this peace might just last.
  * Which is why Marco corners Tom the next day in school.
    * “So,” Marco says, “I had a question.  And you probably don’t know the answer, but you’re like, my second-to-last resort before Chapman, so let’s go with you’re kinda my last hope.  Anyway, I was just wondering, in case you happened to know—”
    * “Supervising the invasion of the Anati system,” Tom says over him, “as of the day the yeerks on Earth kicked it.  No one’s heard from Visser One or her forces since.”
    * “Anati.  That’s far away, isn’t it.”  Marco doesn’t wait for confirmation.  “And if I wanted to, say, send a message to Anati…?”
    * Tom considers for a minute.  “Find Alloran.  He’ll know how.”
  * So Marco goes to Ax.  Just to Ax.  He’s getting closer and closer to the others all finding out about this, but… it’s his mom.  His problem.  He doesn’t want to trouble the others, who all deserve their rest.
    * Ax, however, seems to be bored out of his mind.  He seizes on Marco’s “mission” with enthusiasm, hacking every open-circuit camera he can get his hands on in about two hours flat.
    * Between Tobias being at school for several hours a day and Jake having essentially ordered them all to take a break, Ax has a  _lot_ of time on his hands.  It takes him less than three days to catch sight of a very familiar human morph — tall, balding, with a commanding smile — and figure out where Alloran has been hiding.  The paper trail takes a little more tracing from there, but eventually he gets a hit on a four-star hotel whose penthouse is currently being paid for by a Yeerk Empire shell corporation… and whose penthouse guest has already been reprimanded twice for stealing too many tiny Danishes from the breakfast bar.
  * Alloran listens to Marco, and even seems sympathetic, but insists that, as long as they don’t know what killed the yeerks on Earth, he’s not going to contact the yeerks elsewhere to let them know so that they can start invading Earth all over again.  Which is when Marco reluctantly gets the others involved, on the assumption that one of them will know how so many yeerks ended up dropping dead all at once.
    * Chapman, when asked, immediately blames the oatmeal crisis that was underway at the time when the yeerks died.  However, he has no proof to back up this theory, so he’s not much use.
    * Tom blames the whole thing on inbreeding.  He does not listen to Ax when Ax points out there’s no way a lack of genetic diversity could kill a whole species that quickly.
    * Jake comes up with an elaborate explanation about them having all died of the common cold.  Rachel pokes fun at him for plagiarizing  _War of the Worlds_ , until Cassie points out that technically a lack of genetic diversity could, in theory, leave them open to all being affected by the same disease.
    * Marco and Tobias, it might be said, get a little too far into tinfoil-hat territory around the time they connect an experimental weapons test out of Zone 91 with a fractional shift in the pH of the surrounding atmosphere, which might have something to do with the acid rain out of Nevada… which probably has nothing to do with the yeerks dying.
    * Alloran makes a single, muttered comment about quantum viruses.  He refuses to explain himself, or even to tell anyone what a quantum virus is.
  * Marco writes the whole thing off as a colossal waste of time.  He goes home that night frustrated, defeated, and wondering if Ax is quite bored enough to steal an unused Bug fighter so that they can go on a kamikaze run for Anati.
    * He wakes up tied to a chair in the middle of an abandoned warehouse.
    * “Listen to me, parasite,” a very familiar voice says.  “We can do this the easy way, where you worm yourself out of him right now and no one has to get hurt… or we can do it the very, very hard way.”
    * Which is right around the time that Marco remembers that he definitely pretended to be a controller the last time he saw his mom.  “Oh  _crap_ ,” he says out loud, and then, “I’m guessing you’re not a controller anymore.”
    * “Edriss dropped dead out of the blue, don’t know why.  I stole a Bug fighter and came straight here.”
    * “Huh,” Marco mumbles.  Must be genetic.
    * Eva raises the dracon beam in her hands until it’s pointed at his head.  “Surrender or don’t.  Either way, I’ve got no plans for the next three days.”
    * Marco blinks several times.  Judging by the fuzziness of his vision and the cloying taste in the back of his throat, his mom friggin’  _drugged_  him.  There’s no telling how long he’s been gone.  “I should probably warn you.  Jake and a couple of my other very dangerous friends are gonna be looking for me, and I can pretty much guarantee that when they find us—”
    * “Your threats don’t mean anything to me.”  Eva smiles bitterly.  “After all, I’m already dead.  So I suggest you be quiet, or I might be forced to gag you.”
    * Marco does as he’s told.  Staying quiet and staying put until his mom figures out he’s not a controller seems preferable to fighting her, after all.
  * By his extremely crappy system of internal timekeeping, it is either two hours or two days later that there’s a scraping sound on the roof of the warehouse… almost like a bird of prey landing on the corrugated iron.  Eva stands up, tilting her head to listen.  In the process, she lets the dracon beam drop to her side — which is when the grizzly bear hits her like a freight train.  Her body goes skidding across the floor, a small mountain of brown fur and claws following.
    * “Stop!” Marco bellows.  “Rachel, STOP!”
    * <I’m not gonna kill her, jeez.>  Rachel pins Eva to the ground, leaning just enough weight on the arm that holds the dracon beam that the weapon clatters out of her hand.
    * “She’s not a controller!” Marco says.  “Visser One is dead.”
    * <She has you tied to a chair—>
    * “Yeah, exactly!”  Marco really wishes he could hold up his hands in a placating gesture right now.  “Which we both know I could get out of in about two seconds.  So if she knew I could morph, why bother trying to capture me alone?  If she  _didn’t_  know I could morph, why capture me at all?”
    * Rachel pauses for a second, looking between him and Eva.  <I don’t get it.  Why did she kidnap you, then?>
    * “Because she thinks I’m a controller.”  Marco raises his eyebrows.  “Which means she  _isn’t_.”
    * <Marco’s logic does appear to be sound.>  Ax steps delicately forward.  <In that case, we apologize for inconveniencing you, Mrs. Marco’s Mom.>
    * Rachel sits back on her rump with a  _whuff_  of indignation.  
    * Eva climbs slowly to her feet.  She looks over at where Marco is awkwardly shifting out of the way so that Ax can cut him loose.  “Mijo,” she whispers, “who the hell told you that you were allowed to fight in a war?”
    * Marco stands up, stuffing his hands in his pockets.  “Does this mean I’m grounded?”
    * “Oh yes,” Eva says, pulling him into the tightest hug he’s had in his life.  “For the rest of existence.”
  * It finally happens less with a bang than with a whimper.  The mall downtown is expanding to a new wing, and the construction equipment encounters a sinkhole larger than any California has yet seen.  After a trackhoe breaks through to an underground cavern the size of a football stadium, the county immediately halts all activity and sends a team of archaeologists down to excavate what everyone is clearly expecting to be ancient ruins… and instead proves to be stranger than anyone imagined.
  * It is with no small sense of surreality that Cassie finds herself sitting on her couch with her parents to her left and Rachel to her right, watching on TV as scientists dissect a dracon beam while a Discovery Channel personality narrates the debate about lost civilizations and secret underground cities.
    * “I think it’s high time we gave them some answers,” Rachel says.  “Don’t you?”  Her tone is casual in a way that Cassie recognizes as an act, covering for some of the same nerves she’s feeling herself.
    * Cassie thinks of Toby, struggling to keep her colony alive and hidden.  Thinks of Tom, too-casual just like Rachel when saying “I’m not crazy, right?” five or six times.  Thinks of Ax swinging by twice a day, just to see if there’s anything she needs.  Thinks of Aftran, who — she hopes — would’ve wanted this.
    * And then she picks up the remote and turns off the TV.  “Mom.  Dad.”  She smiles in a way she hopes is reassuring.  “There’s something we have to tell you.”



**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The rebloggable post is [ here.](http://thejakeformerlyknownasprince.tumblr.com/post/175087109174/idea-what-if-partway-through-the-war-all-the)


	20. What if they were 3 years old?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [ Life-is-pointless-was-taken](https://life-is-pointless-was-taken.tumblr.com/) asked: You've done an au for them being 23 and 33 right? And we have them being 13 from canon? So the only thing missing now is them being 3 years old

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Additional warning this chapter for mild child endangerment. Obviously this is pure crack and not to be taken seriously under any circumstances.

 

Elfangor stumbles out of his damaged fighter into the construction site… and stops. 

Five tiny faces look back up at him.

The little boy closest to him, sitting on the ground in a pose that suggests he fell over backwards from looking up too enthusiastically, pulls the thumb he was sucking out of his mouth.  “Are you an  _alien_?”

<Where are your parents?> Elfangor asks, horrified.

“Hi, Mr. Alien, I’m Tobias,” the little boy says, thereby inadvertently answering his question.

Apparently, Elfangor thinks, the Ellimist has developed a sense of humor.

The tiny girl who steps up behind Tobias is wearing a frilly pink tutu and a military helmet, holding a plastic battle axe so large it drags on the ground behind her when she walks.  “Hi, I’m Rachel and that’s Cassie and she’s the  _best_  and those are Marco and Jake,” she announces.  “They’re  _boys_ ,” she adds in a tone that suggests they must all do their best to overlook this hideous affliction in light of Jake and Marco’s many contributions to society.

Jake has been distracted away from his first alien encounter in favor of using a claw hammer to whack holes in a piece of drywall, apparently just for the hell of it.  Marco is absentmindedly chewing on the filthy handle of a found screwdriver as he watches their conversation.  Privately, Elfangor agrees with Rachel’s assessment.

<But how did you even get out here?> he says, sounding plaintive even to himself.

Tobias immediately curls his knees up to his chest.  “Please don’t tell my aunt,” he whispers, sounding terrified.  Elfangor concludes on the spot that he and this aunt person will be having  _words_  later.

“We were playing hide ‘n seek, ‘cause we were in Jake’s backyard, ‘cause it’s his birthday.”  Rachel, apparently the bravest of the lot, pipes up again.  “So I said Tom would never  _ever_ find us if we all hid out here…”  She gives a little twirl of pride.  “And I was right!”

Cassie, who is apparently  _the best_ , is hugging a stuffed wolf to her chest and looks overwhelmed by it all to the point of verging on tears.  Tobias has shoved his thumb back into his mouth in a way that shouldn’t be endearing to the point of adorableness, and yet… And yet Elfangor will admit to perhaps being just a little bit biased.

Jake has moved on from the drywall in favor of using his hammer on a piece of window, so that broken glass shards are flying everywhere.  Marco managed to open the handle of the screwdriver and discovered it is full of detachable heads; he immediately eats two.

All right, that’s it.

“What are you  _doing_?” Cassie blurts out.

<I’m turning into a human,> Elfangor explains.  <And then I’m bringing you all back to where you belong, and then I’m going to go recruit some Marines or something.  Show  _them_  how to morph.   _Honestly_. >

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The rebloggable post is [ here.](http://thejakeformerlyknownasprince.tumblr.com/post/170039995729/youve-done-an-au-for-them-being-23-and-33-right)


	21. What if they lived in the Civil Rights Era?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Anonymous said: What if Animorphs was set before the civil rights movement?
> 
> I misread it as: What if Animorphs was set during the civil rights movement? Oh well.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I justified them all being this civically engaged by making the Animorphs 19 years old in this AU.
> 
> Additional warnings this chapter for violence/gore, war, injury and death, self-injury, (semi-legal) opioid use, racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, anti-semitism, and other prejudices.

  * They take their time.  They plan it carefully.  They're going to get, literally, only one shot at this.  Jake steals the requisitioned Viet Cong rifle from a weapons locker a week in advance.  Over a month early, Marco himself becomes the one to flirt with the sympathetic staff sergeant until Grummald agrees to let him and Jake patrol together.  The evening of, Jake slings his gun over his shoulder (hoping that no one notices in the low light it’s an AK-47 rather than their standard-issue M16).  He promises everyone that he and Marco will be back before 2000 hours.
    * They march almost half their patrol route before Marco says, “You could still take this chance, you know.”
    * Jake’s jaw tightens.  "I'm three months out from making it home free."
    * "And you could get called back for another tour," Marco points out.
    * The steps of this argument are well-worn, fraying at the edges.  Jake claims he’ll go AWOL if that happens.  Marco starts to protest.  Jake states flatly that this decision is final.  As always, nothing changes.
    * They’re at the furthest-out point of their loop when Jake takes the radio off his belt.  “PFC Berenson to Arlo Base, do you copy?”
    * “Falsworth to Berenson, I copy.”
    * Jake relays their position, then adds, “We can hear something movin’, 'bout hundred yards south of us.  Gonna go check it out.  Like as not it’s another of those wild pigs, nothin’ to worry about.”  He gives a faux-nervous laugh and adds, “If it’s another fuckin’ tiger… speak well of us at home, yeah?”
    * Marco smirks.  He’s seen Jake go toe-to-toe with a realtiger out in this jungle before.  The predators should be scared of them, not the other way around.
    * “Copy that,” Falsworth says. “Say safe, Private.”
    * "Yes, sir."  Jake signs off.
    * “Last chance,” Marco says.  “You and me, swap right now—”
    * “How would you carry me back to camp?” Jake asks.  And before Marco can come up with an answer, Jake raises the gun and fires.
    * The first bullet shreds through the flesh of Marco’s right thigh; the second impacts the femur on that same leg and sticks in it with a sickening  _crack_  of bone.  Jake drops the gun in almost the same motion that he snaps the safety back on, already diving forward to lean pressure on the wounds.
    * As Marco sinks back and does his best not to scream or pass out, Jake yanks out his med kit.  He does a hasty but effective job of disinfecting the holes, stapling them shut, wrapping unforgivingly tight pressure bandage around Marco's entire thigh.  Last of all Jake pulls out the pre-prepped shot of heroin.  Leaning close to find a vein, he slides cool, blissful apathy into Marco’s arm.
    * “You’ll take care of yourself, right?” Marco slurs as Jake is carrying him back to camp.  “You’ll be okay?”
    * Jake shifts position slightly, wrapping his free hand around Marco’s wrist.  “I’ll be back before you know it.  I promise.”
  * The system works brutally fast, offering Marco a disability discharge and preliminary repair surgery before dumping him out of its care and off Uncle Sam’s list of concerns as fast as it possibly can.  That suits Marco just fine; he limps out of the hospital on crutches and takes the first opportunity he can to morph, heal, and fly home.
  * Home, as it turns out, needs his help.  Rachel has been leading the team since Jake got drafted, and the half a dozen yeerk projects she’s stopped don’t really make up for the four dead civilians she’s racked up in that time.  "What were you thinking?" Marco demands of Rachel, of all of them.  "Is this how the job is done now, damn the consequences?"


    * <Leave her alone,> Tobias snaps.  <We're doing what we can.>
    * Marco knows where that uncharacteristic harshness comes from.  Tobias feels irrationally guilty that he's got no home address, no draft card, no lottery number hanging over his head.
    * _Good_ , Marco thinks viciously, unable to forget Jake's attempt at a cheerful wave as the MedEvac chopper rose into the air.   _Someone_  should feel guilty for this fucking mess.
  * Cassie gets arrested.  Tobias is the one who goes to bail her out, because he’s the one with the appearance that will automatically earn the cops’ trust and respect.  He finds her sitting in a cell with a dozen other protestors, eye swollen and lip bleeding from a police officer’s baton.
    * “Did you save any more elephants?” he asks Cassie as they let her out, trying to lighten the mood.
    * “No,” she says, sounding tired, sounding sad.  “Apparently I was trespassing.  In a public cafe.”
    * Not knowing what else to do, Tobias pulls her into an awkward hug.  She leans against him, so he guesses he did okay.
    * “Is she your girlfriend?” one of the cops asks, sounding like he has an opinion on the subject if so.
    * “That’s none of your fucking business,” Tobias says softly, gently, as he continues to rub small circles into the back of her shoulder.
  * Marco considers telling Jake just how bad it’s gotten in the real war (as they call it, to tell it apart from this fucking farce of LBJ’s) but finds he can’t come up with the words.  Even their system of codes might not be enough to protect them, if a controller intercepted one of the letters.  That’s the excuse Marco uses, anyway.  The truth is that Jake’s letters are relentlessly cheerful in a way that Marco  _knows_  is a lie, and some combination of not wanting him to worry and sheer passive-aggression lead Marco to match Jake tone-for-tone.
    * _Let me know if you want out.  Ax and I will be there in an instant,_  Marco scrawls at the bottom of a typewritten page.
    * _It’s not so bad over here_ , Jake answers.   _And anyway, we’ve gotta keep a low profile.  Remember?_
    * _Liar_ , Marco writes in return, and then scrubs the word out with his eraser.
  * Rachel does not, it would appear, remember the part about keeping a low profile.  They’re all angry, every single one of them, when the random asswipe calls Cassie an unrepeatable word. Cassie herself accepts it with a hard swallow and a dismissive look, and Marco settles for shouting back a couple insults of his own.
    * Rachel, on the other hand, feels the need to morph grizzly bear and bite said asswipe’s arm hard enough to break it.  She doesn’t seem to care that there are two other witnesses present, or that the others are all shouting for her to stop.
    * She stops short of killing the man.  She even demorphs on her own, and goes charging out the back door of the automat into the empty lot beyond.
    * Marco throws caution to the wind and follows.  “What was that?”
    * She whirls around, hair flying everywhere, tears on her face.  “Why the  _fuck_  are we fighting so hard to save this country, huh?  Huh?”
    * Marco has no answer for that one.  He runs a hand over his hair, unpleasantly surprised for the umpteenth time to remember it’s so short.  At least the U.S. Army cutting it all off gave the neighborhood punks one less reason to call him a hippie queer and kick the shit out of him.  Silver linings.
    * “I can fight my own battles, you know,” Cassie says quietly, stepping up next to Marco.
    * Rachel scrubs both hands over her eyes, sniffing harshly.  “Was he…?”
    * “Not a controller.”  Cassie smiles tightly.  “Just a jerk.”
    * “I’d do it even if he was a controller,” Rachel says.
  * Which is why, feeling like an asshole the whole time but knowing it has to be done, Marco calls for a vote of no confidence against Rachel the very next day.
    * “This is because I’m a woman, isn’t it?”  Rachel leans close to Marco’s face, pointing a shaking finger at him.  “Because I’m some  _weak_  little  _female_  who can’t handle power, according to you!"
    * It’s so wildly untrue that Marco almost laughs, but he’s pretty sure that then Rachel would actually kill him.  “It’s because you’re out of control,” he whispers.  “Because I don’t trust you not to get us killed.  Because you’re one of my best friends and I don’t actually want you to die, but that’s the way you’re headed right now.”
    * “Rachel…” Cassie says.  Whatever she’s about to say gets interrupted when the phone rings inside her house.  Looking pathetically grateful for the excuse, she runs to go get it.
    * <This would just be a temporary measure,> Ax says, halfway between asking Marco and assuring Rachel, <until Prince Jake can come home.>
    * “Exactly.”  Marco nods.  “And he’ll be back in a matter of weeks.”
    * Tobias flutters, shifts, preens feathers.  At last he says, <Rachel, I… I love you.  But I want you to be safe, and…>
    * She rounds on him.  “You too, then?  I have to be kept  _safe_?  You don’t think I’m up for this?  I should just stay home and embroider handkerchiefs and leave the fighting to the men?”
    * “You want Cassie to lead?” Marco babbles.  “Let’s have Cassie in charge.  I love that plan.  That’s the plan where more people don’t die, let’s go with that plan.”
    * <I think that’s…>  Tobias trails off.
    * Cassie is standing in the doorway, phone still in hand, corkscrew cord stretching away into the house.  She doesn’t seem to know she has it, because both her arms are wrapped around herself where she stands in the doorway.  She rocks slightly as she cries.
    * Marco feels all the air punched out of his lungs.  He knows what she’s going to say, well before she finally finds the words.
  * It was fast.  Jake’s mom repeats that seven or eight times.  Single shot to the forehead, no warning.  Body lost to the Mekong River.  It was fast.  Jake’s mom says it again, and Marco feels a curl of disgust underneath the rage.  Of course it was fast; anything else wouldn’t have killed him.  They’re Animorphs.  Anything short of a bullet in the brainpan would’ve been no more than a momentary inconvenience for Jake.
  * <I don’t understand,> Ax says after the funeral.
    * <Yeah.>  Tobias’s voice is dull.  <None of us do.>
    * <No, I…>  He glances at all of them at once.  <I don’t understand why Prince Jake’s grandmother took issue with Rachel’s family being in attendance.  When I asked her myself, she…>  He pauses, sensing that this is sensitive ground.  <She called Rachel’s mother ‘the divorcée’ more than once.>
    * “Yep.”  Rachel bites out the word.  “That about sums it up.”
    * <But I don’t understand.>  Ax’s main eyes crinkle in a frown.  <Unless I have the word wrong, this simply refers to the termination of the relationship between herself and your father.>
    * “It does.”  Rachel sighs.  “You got a problem with that?”
    * <They no longer wished to be wed, and so they were not.  What does that have to do with Prince Jake’s grandmother?>
    * “I don’t know, Ax.  I really don’t.”
    * <But why was she angered by your mother’s presence, but not similarly angered by your father’s?>
    * “Yeah,” Rachel says.  “All really good questions.  If you ever find any answers, be sure to let the rest of us know.”
  * Their argument seems so small, so silly now, Rachel thinks.  She and Marco are sitting side-by-side a hundred yards up in an enormous pine overlooking the cemetery, watching through raptor eyes as Jake’s parents go through the last of the motions for the burial of an empty coffin.  Then again, the entire Vietnam War seems horrifyingly petty in light of what’s happening with the yeerks, and that didn’t stop the two of them from bickering before.
    * <During the battles, Cassie makes the calls,> Rachel says.  <She tells us when to attack, when to retreat, when to change the plan on the fly.  The rest of the time, we vote.  Yeah?>
    * <Agreed.>  Marco shifts, talons scratching the bark.  <First motion to put to the group: VA hospitals.>
    * Rachel glances over, a sharp twitch of her eagle neck.  <What about them?>
    * <They’re full of wounded and disabled soldiers, and…>  Marco lets out a laugh that is full of pain, not mirth.  <And, and it’s funny.  But maybe the worst fucking thing about being in Vietnam is that there are no yeerks.  Not anywhere in the armed forces, anyway.  Because why bother?  The U.N. doesn’t give a shit about us, our country doesn’t give a shit about us, our own towns hated us so much they picked us to send off to die.  We leave home where we get called hippie scum by the older generation, we go to kill some poor clueless kids who are trying to kill us back, we get home only to get spat on by hippie scum who call us babykillers.  And even the yeerks don’t care about us, because no one else does.  Which is downright hilarious, when you think about it.>
    * <You want to recruit more Animorphs.>  Rachel’s plenty smart; she figures it out.  <And you want to start where you know the yeerks won’t be.  Start with people who already have military training.>
    * <I know a guy.  From the Army.  James.  Sniper bullet took out his spine somewhere around the stomach area.  He’s smart.  Tough.  Decent.  Doesn’t entertain fools.  He’d be a start.>
    * <Let’s put it to the group.> Rachel opens her wings.  <Nothing much else for us to see around here, anyway.>
  * <Prince Cassie, do you ever… ever wonder what will happen if we win?> Ax asks one day.
    * She takes a hand off her pitchfork, beckoning him further into the barn.  “I do.  I assume you do too?”
    * <My people have very different customs from yours.>  He steps delicately between the cages.  <And some which are much the same.  We have a term, vecol, which…>  He shakes his head, a very human gesture.  <It doesn’t matter.  I worry sometimes, though.  What my people might think of the team we now have.  What you, my friends, might think of my people when you learn.>
    * Cassie leans the pitchfork against the corner between a post and the first horse stall.  “I’m pretty sure if we win, we’ll claim Tobias was leading us the whole time.”  She smiles.  “He’ll hate that, of course, but pretty much any alternative would be worse.”
    * <You wouldn’t even acknowledge Prince Jake’s leadership?>
    * “Oh, we’d honor his memory, to be sure, if we could.”  She takes a breath, feeling Ax’s fear — that her entire species will be measured and found wanting, for its outdated and terrible beliefs — and tries to find words.  “Jake’s parents are Jewish.  Marco’s mother is Latina.  Rachel and I are female, and neither of us has the good white Protestant family to be fully American.  James and Timmy and the others aren’t even allowed to have human rights in the U.S., much less…”  She grimaces.  “It’s not his fault, but Tobias…”
    * <Tobias is half andalite.>  Ax says it with pride rather than defensiveness.
    * “And yet, he — when he's human — also looks like the people you see on TV.”  She raises her eyebrows.  “You have to have noticed that none of the people on any of the shows look like most of us.”
    * <You are fighting against this, though.>  Ax gestures to the Black Power poster Cassie’s dad hung above the refrigerator that holds their feeder mice.  <You take the time to fight these battles, as well as those against the yeerks.>
    * “It’s like Toby said.”  Cassie shrugs.  “I want us to have a place to come back to where we can be safe, once the war is done.”
    * <I understand,> Ax says.  <Or rather, I think I do.  Maybe it would be best for me to explain to you how we are taught to think of vecols, and maybe you could tell me how it is I can help this other fight of yours.>
    * Cassie takes his hand in both of hers.  “Maybe I can help in your fight, while we’re at it.  After all, there are infinite battles.  But as long as we're here, we can still keep fighting."



 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The rebloggable post is [ here.](http://thejakeformerlyknownasprince.tumblr.com/post/175186341929/what-if-animorphs-was-set-before-the-civil-rights)
> 
> We don't know Tobias's canon ethnicity or gender identity with 100% certainty. However, there is the moment in MM3 when Tobias appears at Princeton University in the 1940s and gradually realizes that he is the only Animorph who can blend in there: all the students are male, all are white, and (although Tobias might not know this) Jewish students were admitted to Princeton but largely segregated from the main student body. Tobias's This Is Not Okay radar goes off even before he consciously registers the homogeneity of the university. He also does fairly well at being an ally while also staying in his lane when Cassie later confronts the two racist dudes. Ergo: I believe the canon implication is that Tobias's human self is WASP-presenting and cis-male-presenting, but that that doesn't stop him from being Woke As Fuck.


	22. What if Jake was stuck in morph?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [ Inqwatch](https://inqwatch.tumblr.com/) asked: What if someone other than Tobias became a Nothlit?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Additional warnings this chapter for gore, underage drinking, body horror, vomit, and (fake) car accidents.

  * When Cassie finally finds him after the first battle, she discovers that she couldn’t have timed it much worse if she’d tried: she interrupts him in the middle of eating a kill.  She’s a tiny blunt-nailed primate, and he is a 650-pound predator that she has just caught in a moment of vulnerability.  By the time she registers the carcass of the mountain lion at his feet, though, he has already jerked his head up, a growl rumbling softly in the back of his throat.  He takes a step toward her, lips drawn back from blood-darkened teeth, unhurried and unhesitating.
    * “Jake.”  Her voice emerges tiny with fear; she takes a breath and tries again.  “ _Jake_.”  She’s been working with predators since she was six years old.  Her mother taught her to look them in the eye.  To show no fear.  To be firm and unflinching, to force them to be the ones to hesitate.  Funny, how fast common sense flees the mind when the tiny animal brain faces down the hunter and demands the behaviors of prey.
    * “Jake.  STOP!”  Her fists are clenched, her knees locked, her spine drawn up straight.  Her entire body trembles.  “It’s me.  It’s Cassie.  Stop moving,  _right now!_ ”
    * He does stop, ears coming forward, tail lashing at the air.  He’s no longer growling, but he’s crouched now, ready to pounce.
    * Excellent, Cassie thinks with an edge of hysteria.  All she’s done is made him curious; now he’s going to play with his food before he eats it.  “Jake, I need you to stop.  To sit down.  It’s Cassie.  Rachel and Marco and Tobias and I have been looking for you ever since the battle.  We’ve been worried.  Your parents are worried too.”
    * She can see the moment it happens: his ears drawing back, his posture stiffening.  <Cassie?> he whispers.  And then, all in a rush, <Cassie, I can’t, even though I keep trying to— Cassie, it’s been too long, I don’t think I can—>  He whips around, staring at the carcass of the mountain lion.  He freezes there, staring at it.
    * “We’re gonna be okay.  We’re gonna figure this out.  But I need you to calm down, okay?”  She takes a step forward, because apparently she’s lost her mind.  Sneaking up on a stressed-out tiger is probably the stupidest thing she’s ever done.  “Just… calm down.  And we’ll figure this out.”
    * <Cassie,> he says, <I think I’m stuck.>
  * The very next day, Rachel does what she always does: she figures out what needs doing for the good of the team, and she sets about getting it done with no fuss, no drama, and no room for self-doubt.  In this case, what needs to be done is this: she acquires a dolphin morph.  She steals Cassie’s dad’s truck.  She drives down to a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean — and she drives through the guardrail at almost 70 miles an hour.
    * The truck sails in a long arc before crashing into the ocean with shocking force.  Rachel was half-morphed in midair, door open, seatbelt off; she’s out and swimming for shore before it’s even done sinking.
    * Tobias came along to spot her.  He’s the one who pulls her up onto the rocks once she reaches the shore.  Sitting next to her as she shivers and coughs in her soaked morphing outfit, Tobias unscrews the cap to the cheap handle of gin he stole from his uncle’s pantry earlier that day.  It takes all four of their hands to brace the heavy-bottomed Barton bottle as Rachel takes an enormous gulp, gagging on the taste.  After the first six or seven swallows, Tobias gently holds her hair out of her face as she vomits.  And then he leans her back against his chest, picks up the bottle, and helps her force even more of the foul liquid down her throat.
    * By the time the cops arrive twenty minutes later — even faster than Rachel expected, given that she made sure to stage the crash with witnesses on the road — the scene is all in place.  Rachel’s apparently alone on the beach, lips blue with cold, shaking as she sits with arms wrapped around herself next to the puddle of her own puke.  She doesn’t have to fake glassy eyes or slurred speech as she tells the officers that she doesn’t remember what happened, not really, there was a car, her cousin was driving, they were just joyriding, he had more to drink than her, has anyone seen him around, it was just a stupid dare, she’s not sure where he is now…
    * The cops must buy Rachel’s non-story, because two of them immediately dive into the ocean while a third frantically calls for Coast Guard backup.  Her BAC, when they check, is a whopping 0.28%.  She feels a little bad, through the thick gin haze, for wasting so much of their time and worry.  At least there’s no making the polyester of their uniforms any worse with exposure to sea water, she comforts herself.
    * No one finds the wreck of the car until the next day, which is why it comes as little surprise that, apparently, Jake’s body has floated away and probably won’t be recovered.  Mission accomplished.  Match and set.
  * Jake listens to the total of charges against Rachel — underage intoxication, reckless endangerment, the utter loss of her mother’s good faith and trust — in grim silence, his tail lashing in agitation.  <You didn’t have to do that,> he says at last.  <I never would have asked you to—>
    * Rachel shrugs.  “Too bad.  I did it anyway.  You’re welcome.”
    * “It was a good plan, actually.”  Tobias smiles shyly at her.  “Although we also appreciate Marco coming through on the fly to back our story.”
    * “Oh, fuck you,” Marco snaps.  “‘On the fly,’ huh?  That’s what you’re calling it?”
    * Tobias looks hurt.  “If we’d realized they’d question you about what Jake and Rachel were doing last night—”
    * “The next time—”  Marco points a shaking finger at Tobias’s nose.  “The next time the  _fucking_  cops show up at my  _fucking_ door in the middle of the  _fucking_  night to ask…”  He falters, swallows, continues.  “To ask if someone I love has ever shown self-destructive tendencies, to ask me how well they know how to  _swim_ …”  He draws a breath.  “I’d like a little bit of  _fucking_  advance notice.”
    * There’s a long, horrible silence.  Marco turns away from Tobias, from them all.  He scrubs a hand over his own face as if trying to get something unpleasant off his skin.
    * “We’re sorry,” Tobias says, voice small.
    * Marco spins back around, rubbing his hands together brusquely.  “Congratulations, you’re dead,” he tells Jake.  “You wanna go to your own funeral?”
    * “ _No_ ,” Jake and Rachel and Cassie all say at the same time.
  * Jake does his best not to mope when the others take risk after risk without him there.  Infiltrating Chapman’s house.  Sabotaging a water truck.  Rescuing Ax.  The others all come out to the woods long enough to run their plans by him and ask his opinion, but he can’t tell if it’s because he’s still their leader or if they’re just being polite.
  * <Marco,> Jake whispers in private thought-speak, as they huddle in a cell on the Pool ship and await execution.  <Marco, if you make it out of this and I don’t… Never tell my parents.  Not about what happened, not about anything.  Ever.>
    * Marco thinks of his mom’s empty grave.  Thinks of Visser One, standing somewhere just down the hall from them at this very moment.  <You got it, fearless leader,> he says.  <Not a word.>
  * Leaning against Jake’s warm, furry side as they all huddle in her barn against a thunderstorm, Cassie frowns at the nearness of his ribs to the surface of his skin.  Her mom feeds the big cats at the Gardens up to 25 pounds of meat a day; even a captive tiger can eat an entire 120-pound pig carcass in a single sitting.  Jake plays coy about how many deer he catches and eats, probably because he’s shy — and maybe because he doesn’t want her to worry.
    * Cassie runs a hand over his back, feeling the knob of each vertebra even underneath the thick coating of fur.  It’s an issue for another day.  Right now they have more urgent problems: yeerks, and apparently robots called chee.
    * “So are the rest of us allowed to snuggle up with the giant heating blanket,” Marco asks, “or is that a privilege reserved for your honey-pie?”
    * Jake bares his teeth in a snarl, the faintest growl rumbling the back of his throat.  He’s being more playful than not, which doesn’t prevent the effect from being terrifying.
    * “Fine, fine, can’t blame a guy for trying,” Marco says in a voice much higher than usual, holding up both hands in apology.
    * Cassie nudges the topic back to the question of what to do about Erek King and this pemalite crystal, perfectly aware why Jake was annoyed.  He insists that he and Cassie are not anything to each other, or just friends, the way they’ve always been.  Cassie finds it sweet that he so clearly wants to keep her options open, to let her find a human boyfriend if she wants… Or she would, if it wasn’t just a little bit patronizing as well.
  * Two days after the Ellimist takes it upon himself to tell a couple escaped hork-bajir to “follow the black and orange cat” to freedom, Jake shows up at their high school as his human self.  With a dubious strawberry-blonde dye job, a pretentious scarf masking most of his chin, and a thick pair of glasses, he’s thoroughly unrecognizable.  Still, he only stays long enough for him and Cassie to sit in the back row of the auditorium and wave as Rachel receives her academic award, and then he ducks out before his aunt and uncle can get a good look at his face.
  * A week after that, Rachel concocts a surprise of her own.  Homer lets out a yelp of fear at the sight of the tiger, which turns into a whine of confusion as soon as he hears Jake’s voice assuring him that it’s all okay.  The golden retriever stops squirming as soon as a soft paw nudges against his side and the acquiring trance begins.
    * Rachel and Tobias take the real Homer to the park for an afternoon of playing fetch and napping in the grass.  Jake, meanwhile, runs through the doggy door and enters his own home for the first time in almost a year.  Rachel was sure to pick a Saturday: Tom will be at the Sharing but both Jake’s parents are almost certainly home.
    * It’s getting dark, and both she and Tobias are getting worried even though neither one of them wants to say it, when finally a copy of Homer comes running up to join them.  Jake’s ears are flattened, his tail tucked between his legs.  He doesn’t say a word through the process of sending the real Homer back home, following them to the edge of the forest before he finally demorphs back to tiger.
    * <Thanks,> he says at last, an off note in his voice.  <Really.>
    * “Any time,” Rachel says, meaning it.
    * <I won’t be doing that again.>  Jake jumps with deceptive ease, landing on a branch over ten feet off the ground.  There’s a faint rustle, and a flash of orange as he leaps to the next tree over.  And then he’s gone.
  * One of the injured horses in Cassie’s dad’s care dies in the night.  She leaves the carcass on the edge of their property, knowing it’ll be gone by morning.
  * <This animal attacked me,> Ax says, when he brings the corpse of the wolf to Jake.  It’s the truth.  It’s also true that Ax could have fended off the attack without killing, but he chooses not to mention that fact.
  * A wildfire drives deer, mountain lions, even rabbits and raccoons from the national forest.  After two weeks after gnawing her cuticles and glaring at the news, Rachel blows her entire allowance on a duffel bag’s worth of frozen chickens.  When she plops them down in the middle of Jake’s meadow, she makes eye contact with him long enough to snarl, “ _You’re welcome_ ” in a tone that books no argument about the nearly $300 she just spent keeping him alive.  Then she turns and marches home.
  * Marco’s the one who does the math about the bodies — hork-bajir, occasionally taxxon, probably human too — that they left behind after the half a dozen battles they’ve had in the woods so far.  But then, it’s Marco.  He has the good sense to keep his trap shut.
  * They’re at the risk of fracturing, Jake knows, into separate teams.  He and Ax hang out, map Yeerk Pool entrances in dog or human morph, watch TV.  Rachel and Tobias seem to be living out of each other’s pockets, spending all their free time so entwined that Jake doesn’t know whether he should be worried.  Marco and Cassie are satellites, isolated from the team except on missions.  It’s not cohesive.  It’s not coherent.
  * And then David comes along, and changes everything.
    * “Who do you think would win a fight between a tiger and a lion?” David whispers, and in the moment, Jake just  _whuffs_ out a long kitty sigh, not bothering to dignify that with a response.
    * Later, on the roof of the mall, Jake will realize it comes down to a thousand little things.  The fact that it’s night, and he can see almost as well in the dark as full daylight, while David’s morph is a daytime desert hunter.  The fact that he’s had hundreds more fights in this shape than David has in his.  But what it really comes down to is this: David uses cat-shape, and Jake is all cat.
    * <Stay down,> Jake snaps, after the third or fourth time he sends David sprawling across the concrete roof.  <Do yourself a favor and just stay down.>
    * David staggers to his feet, lunges again.  On instinct, on habit, on skill, Jake sees where he will pounce and twists out of the way, just far enough to slam into him in midair.  There’s no point in going for the throat, not with that mane.  Instead, locking both front paws around his neck, Jake brings up his back claws and slashes across David’s stomach.  David whips around and gets his teeth around Jake’s ear, shredding it, but it’s already too late.  Jake is dragging eight hooked knives through David’s soft underbelly.
    * This time, David collapses to the ground and doesn’t get up.  He’s bleeding heavily, pale intestine peeking through the blood-matted fur that Jake has shredded.  With a dismissive shove, Jake sends him off-balance enough so that he’s lying on his back.  Defeated.
    * Jake will tell the others, when asked, that he was waiting for a second opinion.  That he needed Rachel and Ax to approve his decision, and that’s why he was frozen in place where he stood over David when they arrived.  The truth, however, is that standing with locked knees and clenched jaw was the only way Jake could keep control of the desperate desire to finish the fight, the way his tiger half and more than a little of his human self were dying to do.
    * It’s lucky, really, that backup — witnesses — arrive so quickly.  David doesn’t have any idea just how lucky.
    * <Here’s what’ll happen,> Jake says.  <You’re gonna morph human.  A little of yourself if you want, and a little DNA from at least one of the rest of us.  Ax will show you how to combine DNA.  You’re gonna morph.  You’re gonna wait two hours.  And when you’re done, you’re going to go turn yourself in at the youth shelter downtown under an assumed name.  If you try to fight back, try to tell anyone about us, try anything at all, then we will kill you.  We will be watching you, ready.  Is that clear?>
    * David nods, just once.
  * One of Cassie’s Biology books compares the impact of an attacking tiger to that of a piano falling on an unsuspecting victim from a second-story window.  Only, the text points out, the tiger is  _designed_ to drop on you where the piano is not.  And if it’s a tiger… the impact is only the beginning.   _Yeah_ , Cassie thinks,  _that about sums it up._
    * Jake is their vanguard, their first defense, their protector.  He is speed and agility and viciousness that can out-fight even Rachel’s elephant or grizzly.  He’s the point of their phalanx, every time they fight.  He cuts a hole through the front line of controllers time and again, leaving a path of carnage for the others to follow.
    * It’s more than that, though.  The yeerks have to know that Ax is living in the national forest, that there are free hork-bajir hidden in the area as well.  But yeerk patrols which go into those woods come back blooded and battered, on the rare times when they come back at all.
    * Defending his territory is as easy as breathing for Jake.  It’s practically a game to the cat mind, prowling through the treetops and brush to stalk his prey (mountain goats and deer, hork-bajir and taxxons) or else simply sprawling out on a branch to wait in lazy silence for the kills to come to him.   _Don’t go into the woods_ , the controllers tell each other,  _and if someone makes you, you can kiss your butt goodbye.  You’ll never even see your death before all six hundred pounds of it sink claws into your skin and close teeth around your throat._
  * “Why didn’t you tell us you had the flu?” Marco asks, for the umpteenth time since Jake started acting feverish in the middle of their sucky eel field trip to the sewers.
    * “Sorry,” Jake mumbles, “Di’nt realize.  Never been sick before.  Sorry.”  Never been sick as a tiger, he means.  
    * Jake veers them both toward the left, until Marco course-corrects them back toward Tobias’s edge of the sidewalk.  “Don’t throw up again,” Marco says.
    * “Where’re we goin’?” Jake asks, tone distinctly petulant.
    * “My place,” Tobias says.  “Marco’s dad or Cassie’s parents would probably be alarmed if you came back from the dead, whereas my uncle doesn’t notice my presence most of the time, much less…”  He stops, blushing.
    * “Much less all those times that Rachel has spent the night?”  Marco raises his eyebrows, grinning.
    * “Yes,” Tobias says primly.  “Also, shut up.”
    * “Wasn’t sayin’ anything,” Jake says.
    * “Romeo wasn’t talking to you, Hobbes.”  Marco looks at Tobias again.  “If he’s this out of it, he’s probably going to end up killing and eating someone in the middle of the night.”
    * “I’ll lock him in my room tonight,” Tobias says.  “And anyway, if he eats my uncle it’ll be no great loss.”
    * “I don’t wanna eat any humans,” Jake whines.  “Humans taste gross.  They’re all covered in shampoo and detergent and stuff.”
    * Marco and Tobias digest this tidbit in silence for several seconds.  And then they exchange a glance with each other and decide they’re both going to forget they ever heard that.
    * “Plus,” Jake continues, utterly unaware, “There’s testos… tosser… tessosserone.”  He squints at Marco as if they are much further than six inches apart.  “Girl deer taste better.  ‘cause hormones.”
    * “Thank you,” Marco says solemnly, “ever so much, for making sure the rest of us share in the urge to puke our guts out.  Really.”
    * “Shit like this the reason I’m a vegetarian,” Tobias mutters.
  * Jake’s great-grandfather dies.  Rachel doesn’t know all of the details, other than the fact that her mom hears from his mom that there was some kind of drama or something around who would attend the funeral.  She doesn’t tell Jake, because honestly he’s already homesick enough without her giving him news that won’t make him feel any better.  What she doesn’t know, however, is that he’s in the habit of checking up on his family all on his own.
    * He’s quiet for several days after.  He spends most of their next several meetings sitting in silence, chin propped on his front paws, mind clearly elsewhere.  Rachel’s no good at this kind of thing, which is why she points it out to Cassie.  Cassie has, of course, already noticed, but it takes her nearly a week to catch him alone.
    * “You want to tell me what’s going on?” she asks.
    * Jake doesn’t answer.
    * They’re walking through the woods behind her house.  It always makes her feel romantic and mysterious to be stalking through the dusky forest with a tiger at her side, like she’s that princess from East of the Sun and West of the Moon.
    * “Is there at least anything I can do?” Cassie prompts.
    * With a small shake, Jake seems to arrive at some conclusion.  <Could…>  He hesitates.  <This would be, like, a really major favor.  So I want you to say no if you think it doesn’t make sense.  I want you to be honest with me.>
    * Cassie’s not sure what they’re talking about, but his tone gives her chills.  “Tell me what it is, and I’ll tell you whether I can do it.”
    * <It’s Homer.>  Jake is looking away from her as he walks.  His tone is casual in a way that doesn’t fool her at all.  <I was wondering if, y’know, if you’d be willing to check on him a couple times a week.  Maybe… Maybe ask your parents if they’d be willing to take him in.  Just if you can.  If you have the time.>
    * “Yeah, sure.”  Cassie frowns, wishing he’d look at her.  “That’s no trouble at all, seeing as we’ve already got an entire menagerie at home.  Jake… did something happen?”
    * <I appreciate it, really.>  He glances at her, and then turns away again as if unable to bear eye contact.  <It’s a huge weight off.  It’s just, see, I don’t think he’s really being taken care of these days.  Not when he’s living in a house with no one but controllers.>
  * Later, Rachel will feel like an idiot for not having figured it out.  Sure, she doesn’t see that much of Jake’s family, but it’s obvious in hindsight.  They’re not pretending that hard.  Jake’s dad quit his job and transferred to a local hospital that’s rotten with yeerks, whereas his mom can suddenly be seen at the main marketing office for the Sharing.  All three of them leave the house together once every three days like clockwork, back two hours later to resume their lives like nothing happened.  None of the Animorphs know exactly what happened or when, other than the fact that Rachel’s pretty sure that that funeral had something to do with it.  Maybe the travel plans, maybe the wrong kind of questions, maybe something else entirely caused the yeerk inside Tom to infest his parents.
    * Cassie adopts Homer.  It’s the least she can do.
  * Rachel outright tells Jake, more than once, to stop being a selfish prick and just go out with Cassie the next time she asks.  Every time he asks her, nicely but firmly, to drop the subject.  At least until after the war.
  * Jake doesn’t expect the ground to literally drop out from under him in the middle of a battle outside a yeerk compound.  He lands on his feet, of course, all four sets of claws at the ready.  But he’s also alone, lost, and surrounded by what must be hundreds of taxxons.
    * Before panic can set in, a single taxxon slithers forward to regard him critically, and with only a moderate amount of visible hunger.  <What’s your name?> the taxxon says.
    * Jake stiffens in surprise.  The voice sounds andalite.  <I’m Jake,> he says.  <You’re…>
    * <A fellow nothlit, yes.>  The taxxon gives a small, mocking bow.  <Arbron.  We chose you because we’ve seen you go straight from that form to other morphs, even though it is evident you were not born a tiger.  So we know you’ll be sympathetic to our cause.>
    * <That might be true,> Jake says.  <What cause, exactly?>
  * The taxxons’ proposal sounds, to Jake, like the first true spot of hope they’ve had since the war began.  After hammering out the details with Toby and the other Animorphs, they agree: the taxxons can have access to the morphing cube, as can any yeerks who want it, provided anyone who uses it agrees to become a nothlit.  It’s not bad, Jake assures them, even nice in a lot of ways to be nearly-invincible and super-strong.
    * And that’s how hosts start disappearing from the Yeerk Empire.  Mostly they’re taxxons at first, free to wander off long enough to meet Jake and Ax in the woods so that they can morph and transfer.  But there’s a trickle of humans and gedds and hork-bajir that start flowing in as well, ones who escaped — or whose yeerks let them go.
    * It’s not long before yeerks themselves start showing up.  They wander into the woods, most of them with human hosts who agreed to give a ride for this exact purpose, and call up at the trees, asking the andalites nicely if they could please morph and leave this stupid war.  Ax is floored the first time it happens, and pleasantly surprised the second.  By the fifth or sixth batch of yeerks, he starts to suspect this thing is for real.
  * Visser Three issues an announcement that any yeerk found deserting the empire to become a nothlit will be executed.  Which is very considerate of him, because that’s how the 90% of yeerks who didn’t already know end up finding out that that’s an option.
  * Within three months, the Yeerk Empire has been peacefully decimated, and there are nearly four thousand new whales repopulating the Pacific Ocean.  Within four months, Toby has to double the size of the hork-bajir valley to account for the sheer number of former controllers of all species who have opted to remain in their original forms and live in her colony.  Within six months, yeerks’ efforts to recruit new human hosts are becoming ever more desperate, because taxxons and hork-bajir  _keep disappearing_.  Visser Three’s attempts to control his shrinking empire are ever harsher, ever stricter, ever more terrifying.
  * The Animorphs never find out who does it, whether it’s a Peace Movement yeerk or just a disgruntled underling.  What Erek does report back to them is this: one of Visser Three’s own bodyguards opened fire, as the other three guards stood by and watched.  He was dead before he even had time to cry out — and the new leader of the yeerk invasion of Earth would very much like to negotiate a surrender.
  * The day after the U.N. and Council of Thirteen and Andalite Electorate representatives sign the armistice, Jake leaves behind his role in negotiations.  As all his friends watch, he plunges into the Pacific surf.  Cassie morphs dolphin to join him, while Rachel and Tobias both just wade in as humans.  For nearly an hour they roll and duck and splash each other in the sandy water.  It’s maybe too intense, too solemn, for them to be playing, even though they try.  Eventually Jake wades back out to dry land.  He shakes himself off, fur glittering in the sunlight, and with a soft sigh he begins to morph for the very last time.
  * “And you seriously spent almost three years like that?” Tom says, frowning.
    * “You know that’s, like, the four hundredth time you’ve asked, right?” Jake says.
    * “I’ll stop asking when it stops being weird,” Tom says.  “Ergo, probably never.”
    * They’re sitting on the grimy concrete floor of a California warehouse, converted into a temporary government processing center.  There have to be over five thousand other people waiting with them in tiny clusters and clumps, all there for the same reason: the hope that the next name of a newly-freed yeerk host the man with the megaphone calls out will be the right one.  The crowd has undulated, swelling with new arrivals and shrinking every time someone finds a loved one and leaves, the entire eight hours Jake has been here.
    * He’s already gotten lucky once.  Tom is sitting with his back propped against a wall, eyes half-lidded with exhaustion.  Twice, if you count the fact that Marco left along with his mom just half an hour before.
    * “So did you have a set of those little mouse-shaped toys with the bells in them?” Tom asks, smirking.  “You cough up any hairballs?”
    * “Dude.”  Jake rolls his eyes.  “Tiger, not a housecat.”
    * “Does that mean you won’t be running into the kitchen every time Mom opens a can of tuna from now on?”
    * “No tuna.  Just depopulating the local forest of deer and risking shotgun pelts to the butt by occasionally going after livestock.”  Jake gives the simple version.
    * Tom chuckles, the sound weary.  “Nah, still fuckin’ weird.”
    * “Yeah.”  Jake looks down at his soft hands, his small and clumsy body.  He still feels off-balance, days later.  “It is weird.”
    * “That’s…”  Tom cuts himself off, suddenly surging to his feet.  Jake tenses, following him, wishing for claws that will never again slide to the ready with a moment’s thought.
    * Even clear across the room, Jake’s human vision lets him see as the very familiar shape walks through the door.  As his mother’s eyes scan the room, then stop on him.  As they go wide with shock… and then fill with tears.



**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Rebloggable post [ here.](http://thejakeformerlyknownasprince.tumblr.com/post/175453707111/what-if-someone-other-than-tobias-became-a) The quote comparing a tiger to a falling piano comes from [ this book.](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7624594-the-tiger)


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